Dear Sirs, I am.
James Song1
Suppose you are allowed one infraction from a comprehensive moral code. No, suppose you have thirty, or sixty, or ninety chances at a morally flawless life. And suppose that once you run out of those chances, you cannot re-enter the game.
Now suppose we are in a “state” (Sam’s word) of sin, meaning we will invariably run out of those chances.
The promise of Christianity is a way out of the sinful state which implies our inevitable failure through the steadfast loving-kindness of God. He gives you endless chances.
Dostoevsky gives us useful categories of modern personality. There is Fyodor the buffoon, Smerdyakov the nihilist, Alyosha the coming-of-age seeker and spirit of encouragement, Father Zossima the good-humored dying saint that enjoys jam,2 Father Ferapont the ascetic monk that gets a grim characterization, Dmitri, who personifies lust, and Ivan, who personifies pride.
Of interest here are the latter two. They are two aspects of sin, personified by the two sons in the parable of the prodigal son,3 by the deplorable tax collector and the self-righteous Pharisee, by the “insect” and the intellectual, by Dmitri and Ivan.
There is, on the one hand, the prodigal son, who takes his share of the family inheritance and spends his last penny on booze and babes. He hits rock bottom, comes to himself, and returns to his father’s house, murmuring to himself the apology he intends to give his father.
Dmitri is an instance of the “prodigal son” archetype. His biological father, Fyodor, also a sensualist, is not his spiritual father, to whom he returns. Dan points out the probable sustained repentance—genuine change—of Dmitri in America.
The sensualist can kick his habit. Repeated attempts at holiness and repeated failures seem to be a feature of the sensualist’s road to repentance. Maybe this is the only way. That would make grace the only guarantor for a new self.
But the prodigal son has an older brother. The older brother stays home with the father and lives by the book. When he finds a costly celebration at his expense on account of his prodigal little brother’s return, he is infuriated and wouldn’t join the party.
The older son’s response when his father comes out to beg him to join: Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!4
The older brother has his own thoughts, like Ivan. He expects something for his good behavior and criticizes the father’s generosity. He has his own sense of justice, of how the moral balance should tip in this case, just as Ivan does when he returns his “ticket to heaven.” The “older brother” archetype refuses to enter the house of the father on principle.
The late Tim Keller, a brilliant Presbyterian pastor, brings lust and pride together and, surprisingly, ranks the two: “Lust may drive a man to sleep with a beautiful woman - but at least lust makes him want her. Pride drives a man to sleep with a beautiful woman just to prove he can do it and to prove he can do it above the others.”5
Pride, not lust, caused Lucifer’s downfall. Ivan, at the book’s end, is left unconscious, while Dmitri emerges with a changed consciousness. Philosophy proves more pernicious than passion, pride more destructive to the human soul than lust.6
This is not a defense of lust or the exploitation of “radical empathy,” nor is it a dismissal of reason. This piece doesn’t directly address the idea that “the Christian ethic of endless moral bailouts… trained Dmitri to behave” in the despicable, pitiful ways that he did.
I simply state how The Brothers Karamazov captured my attention: the Karamazovs may be ineradicable parts of me. And, being the predictable, petty, and stubborn hypocrite that I am, I need nothing less than “radical empathy” to approach again the image of the holy God.
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Notes:
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The title is from the famous letter by G. K. Chesterton, who, in 1910, replied to the request of London’s newspaper The Times for essay responses to the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” My piece is a response to Dan’s great piece, In Search of a New Year’s Resolution. ↩
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Father Zossima shows Dostoevsky’s opposition to austere asceticism as the way to salvation as well as the idea that the Christian mission today is not within the arcane, isolated walls of monasteries but is in the world, engaged, beginning, perhaps, with communities of children. ↩
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From a great little book called “The Freedom Of Self-Forgetfulness.” ↩
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Dostoevsky has a stronger take on the lust-pride problem than Jesus, who ends the parable with the father’s open arms for his older son: Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found (Luke 15:31-32, ESV). Jesus would offer a moral bailout to Ivan as well. But perhaps Dostoevsky does, too: Alyosha kisses Ivan after Ivan’s story of the Grand Inquisitor. ↩