Despite my whining, Part II was astounding. Several important events occur: Alyosha pledges to marry Lise, the crippled daughter of Madame Khokhlakova; Smerdyakov sets into motion events that will give Dmitri the opportunity and the motive to kill his father; Alyosha meets Snegiryov, a man whom Dmitri disgraced, and his son, Ilyusha; and finally, Elder Zosima recounts his life story and dies.
Most significantly (at least to me), Part II is when Ivan and Alyosha have lunch together; it is there, in Book V, that Ivan's philosophy and worldview finally get a full treatment, and it's far and away the greatest 30 or 40 pages I've ever read. Ivan is what makes me come back to this book over and again.
Ivan, the Riddle
"Brother Dmitri says of you -- Ivan is a tomb! I say of you, Ivan is a riddle." -- Alyosha
No one has a secure understanding of Ivan. His father says he has "no particular learning," but his not-so-secret love, Katerina, thinks he is "so learned, such an academician." In Part I, he argued for the authority of the church to replace the authority of the state -- a position which even the monks did not support -- despite being a confirmed atheist. It is rather significant, then, that Alyosha calls Ivan a "riddle." We have heard much of riddles already, especially from Dmitri, who declared the beauty of this world to be a riddle sent from God, one which he could neither comprehend nor bear. As we will see throughout the novel, particularly in this part, Ivan is incredibly complex, rich, and conflicted.
Ivan, the Romantic
"Love life more than the meaning of it?" -- Ivan
At the beginning of their lunch, Alyosha and Ivan get along without incident. Despite Alyosha having more or less outed his brother for being in love with Katerina hours prior, the two find they have more in common than anticipated. Specifically, they share a love of life. Ivan is the first to wax romantic: "I love the sticky little leaves in spring," he says, paraphrasing Pushkin, and nutshells his love by saying, "It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving with one's inside, with one's guts."
We should first notice that, in the following Book, Elder Zosima commands those gathered around his deathbed to "love every leaf," which suggests an intellectual and possibly spiritual connection between the tortured Ivan and the serene Zosima. Regardless, Alyosha is delighted to hear this. "I think everyone should love
life above everything else in the world," he says, prompting Ivan to ask,
in my favorite line in all of literature, "Love life more than the meaning
of it?" It sounds to me like he asks half in derision and half in earnest. He clearly does love
life more than the meaning of it -- what meaning is there in sticky little
leaves? -- but the prospect of love over logic is worthy of ridicule to him
still. In asking his question, he wants Alyosha -- or someone, anyone -- to
admit it, so that he can see for himself that it is a possibility. He wants
someone to say the words, to bring the fact into the world, that love can trump
logic, and Alyosha does not disappoint: "Certainly," he declares
without hesitation, "love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be
regardless of logic, and it's only then one will understand the meaning of
it." One must love first, Alyosha says, and meaning will follow. Moreover,
Ivan must recognize the implication of that statement: Chasing meaning will
get you nowhere.
Ivan, the geometer
"I made up my mind long ago not to understand." -- Ivan
From here, Ivan more or less forces Alyosha to enter into a discussion about God. He does not, however, give up his worldview easily. He begins stupidly, because "stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a scoundrel, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.”
The gist of his tirade is that he "accepts God," but the details are murkier. I will quote this part of his speech at length because it was endlessly profound when I first read it in high school, and it still is:
“But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in Euclid’s geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can’t understand even that, I can’t expect to understand about God… And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not… And so I accept God and am glad to, and what’s more I accept His wisdom and His purpose, which are entirely unknown to us, I believe in the underlying order and the meaning of life, I believe in the eternal harmony in which they say we shall one day be blended, I believe in the Word to Which the universe is striving, and Which Itself was ‘with God,’ and Which Itself is God and so on, and so on, to infinity… It’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept… I believe like a child…that, finally, in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will occur and be revealed that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the redemption of all the crimes of humanity… Let this, let all this come true and be revealed, but I don’t accept it and don’t want to accept it! Let the parallel lines even meet and I see it myself; I’ll see it and say that they met, but still I won’t accept it.”
Ivan dismisses all arguments about the existence of God with elegance. There is no need to argue, he says, because we don't have the capacity to understand God. You must take it on faith either way, because if you with your Euclidean mind can't even understand everything that has been thought up by a brutish creature like man, how can you claim -- how can you dare -- to say you know anything about God?
Ivan's tirade also touches on several points that have been recurring in the novel. His final statement is, "Let the parallel lines even meet... I'll see it and say that they met, but still I won't accept it." Miracles -- in this case, the phenomenon of parallel lines meeting -- are never a stumbling block for the realist, the narrator said in Part I. Faith does not come from the miracle, but the miracle from faith (cf. doubting Thomas). Ivan may be rebellious and revolutionary, but he is just another human being; he is just like everyone else who sees but refuses to believe.
This is also the time to remember Dmitri's words from Part I: "God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the two shores of the river meet and all contradictions stand side by side." God's riddles -- perhaps more specifically here, God's temptations -- furiously assail Dmitri, whereas Ivan dismisses them. There is surely more here than a mere comparison of the brothers, but I'm out of ideas.
Ivan, the heretic
"I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for." -- Ivan
Unfortunately, matters are never simple with Ivan. Though he says he accepts God, he does not accept the world that's been created by him nor the world to come. What, in particular, is unacceptable to him?
It is suffering, although not suffering in general. Men deserve to suffer, he says: "I think if the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness." (Alyosha points out the chain of logic this creates: God created man in His likeness, man created the devil in his likeness, hence God and the devil are alike to Ivan. But more on that later.) Men deserve to suffer because men are evil, men are sinful, men do horrible things, and no one is exempt... except children.
At the heart of Ivan's rejection of religion is his rejection of original sin, the doctrine that each person is sinful because his ancestors -- in Christianity, Adam and Eve; for Ivan, his father -- were sinful. We have come to the real problem: Ivan's hatred of Fyodor; but as it is not addressed directly yet, let's leave it for now. At the moment, Ivan is more concerned with the suffering of innocent children. “If everyone must suffer in order to buy eternal harmony without suffering, what do children have to do with it, tell me, please?” He can't accept the suffering of children for the sins of their fathers, and he tells Alyosha gruesome stories about the abuse and torture of children in order to get him to agree.
Finally, he sums everything up with immortal words: “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return to him the ticket.” “That’s rebellion,” Alyosha whispers, referring to Lucifer's rebellion against God (recall that Satan was originally an angel who waged war in Heaven). This is the power of this section and the genius of Dostoevsky. Ivan is more complex than a run-of-the-mill atheist (for example, Smerdyakov). He believes in God, believes in Him so much that he holds Him accountable for the suffering of children. It is one thing to believe in God or dismiss Him; it's quite another to condemn Him.
Ivan, the poet
"It's a ridiculous thing, but I want to tell it to you..." -- Ivan
I have too much to say about Ivan's prose poem, "The Grand Inquisitor," but I can't fit it all here. You should go read it. Take fifteen minutes out of your day, go read it, and then tell me what you think. If I can, I might make a separate post dedicated to this chapter alone.
Ivan clearly identifies himself with the Inquisitor, the man in charge of the Spanish Inquisition, in charge of torturing unbelievers and heretics into faith in order to lift the burden of free will and grant them the gift of eternal life that he feels was unjustly withheld when Jesus turned down the offers of bread (fulfillment of physical needs and desires), angels (proof of divinity, compulsion to believe), and dominion (an irrevocable position of power on the earth) made to him by the devil, whom the Inquisitor heretically calls the "wise and mighty spirit of the wilderness."
At the core of the story, though, is love. He feels that, by leaving room for suffering ("There is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger.") and doubt (“Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle.”), Jesus excepted too much of men. “Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter.”
This is the immeasurable sadness of Ivan's story. The Inquisitor (and Ivan) feels betrayed. In his mind, he is like the lovelorn youth scorned by his one and only; the child experiencing the first broken promise from his parents; Caesar suffering a final knife in his back from Brutus ("And you?"). He is the butt of any and every betrayal, and his is compounded by the fact that it was his God who betrayed him. When he tells Jesus, "I love thee not," it destroys you, because it is the human answer to Jesus' own lament on the cross of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He has been abandoned, betrayed, left wandering in the wilderness.
But in the face of his hatred, Jesus loves him. When his tirade is finished, Jesus, who has remained silent throughout the story, kisses him, and the Inquisitor, taken aback, frees him but commands him to never return. I don't want to say anything else; let's not speculate about Ivan's faith any further than to say that, in the story he composed, Jesus still loves the world; that, in the story, he has not abandoned the Inquisitor.
Zosima and Truth
"All things are good and wonderful, because all is truth." -- Zosima
The other major character of Part II is Elder Zosima, whose death is the focus of Book VI. Before he dies, he recounts his life story, sprinkled with the beliefs that have shaped his life. The main thing I want to emphasize about Zosima is his relationship to Ivan. Although the two have little interaction in the book, there is certainly an overlap of ideas, especially when it comes to love of life. More significantly, however, I think we are meant to see the contrast between the tortured mind of Ivan -- and Dmitri, and Fyodor, and so many others -- and the simple truth of Zosima.
One thing the translator, Susan McReynolds Oddo, points out in her introduction is that Zosima often leaves out large portions of the scriptures that he quotes and that what he leaves out is often more telling than what he quotes. One example of this is when Zosima recounts the story of Job. While we can draw parallels between Job -- abandoned by God, but still devout -- and Ivan, I just want to mention this: In the story, Job's entire family is killed, but in return for his devotion, he is blessed with another family. Of this, Zosima says: “But how could he love those new ones when those first children are no more, when he has lost them? … It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.” The injustice of suffering is no injustice at all to Zosima, who attributes death to God but also healing. He quotes another Bible verse (which also happens to be the epigraph of the book): “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Zosima's death is the first one we see in the novel, but it is certainly not the last. We would do well to keep theodicy in mind, and the attitude Zosima has toward death and suffering.
Stray Observations
- This post is significantly less complete and focused than I would have liked it to be, but there's just too much. Hopefully you got something out of it. (And if not, just read this book. Like, holy crap, guys, it's worth it).
- Another line about Ivan by Fyodor that I forgot to fit in elsewhere: “But Ivan loves nobody, Ivan is not one of us, people like Ivan are not our sort, my boy, they are like a cloud of dust. When the wind blows, the dust will be gone.”
- A big event that I didn't mention at all: Alyosha's encounter of Ilyusha, a young boy who bites his finger in retaliation for Dmitri dragging his father, Snegiryov, out of a bar by his beard. Ilyusha sees this happen, runs up to Dmitri, kisses his hand, and begs him to stop. Snegiryov tells Alyosha: “For our children... know what justice means, sir… But at that moment in the square when he kissed his hand, at that moment my Ilyushka went through the whole truth, sir. That truth entered into him and crushed him forever, sir.” Ilyusha (apparently) becomes important later on, so we'll talk more about him later.
- Zosima's quote about all being truth is reminiscent of the closing line from Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "'beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" Keats wrote the poem around 60 years before Dostoevsky wrote Brothers K, so it'd be interesting to know if Dosty read him.
- Zosima also talks about the butterfly effect: “All is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.” This idea has shown up in Buddhism (see Siddhartha), but also in Greek religious mysticism. The mathematician Pythagoras, who believed in metempsychosis, says in Ovid's Metamorphosis: "And time itself is like a river, flowing on an endless course." It's pretty awesome how these ideas show up.
- The Grand Inquisitor says, “So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.” This is reminiscent of something Karl Popper said (as quoted in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum): "The conspiracy theory of society... comes from abandoning God and then asking: 'Who is in his place?'"
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