1.3.2014 SS - TOLSTOY AND DOSTOEVSKY; yancey

my deepest doubts about the faith can be summed up in a single question:
WHY DOESN'T IT WORK?
as i travel around the world, i see that christianity brings many improvements to culture..
yet when i talk with devout muslims or hindus, they bring up the many wars...the crime, decadence and family breakdown that mark the christian west today.
i have no defense against their arguments.

i've never met a serious follower of any religion who lacks appreciation for Jesus, but what about the church?

..in his spiritual autobiography, A confession, leo tolstoy mentions that christians
sometimes treat each other worse than they treat people of other faiths.
he grew friendly with catholics, protestants, old believers and anabaptist type movements,
yet the russian orthodox church told him...
'that these people were caught in a lie,
that what gave them their vital strength was a temptation of the devil
and that we alone possessed the only possible truth.
and i saw that all those who do not profess an identical faith are considered by the orthodox to be heretics
-just as the catholics and other churches consider the Orthodox themselves to be heretics

as i think about individual christians i know,
i see some people made incomparably better by their faith
and some made measurably worse.
for every gracious, kind spirited, forgiving christian,
i can point to a proud, mean spirited, judgmental one.
in my own experience, those who strive the hardest and believe the most fervently
are sometimes the least attractive persons.
like the pharisees of Jesus' day,
they get caught up in competition and end up self righteous rather than righteous.

politicians tell me their nastiest letters come from people who quote the bible and claim to speak for God
-which i easily believe since my mailbox shows the same pattern.
how do i resolve the tension between the ideals of the gospel
and the actuality of those who profess it?

..the new testament passages, most notably the sermon on the mount spell out lofty ethical ideals
-Give to everyone who asks you,
Love your enemies,
Never lust,
Don't hate,
Always forgive,
Welcome persecution
-which inevitably shatter against the grim reality of actual human behavior.
i have felt a constant, unresolvable tension over christian failures.
as a journalist, i have observed up close both spectacular and petty defects of prominent spiritual leaders,
many of which never come into public light.
and when i decide to write about myself rather than others,
i soon discover that i write about spiritual disciplines far better than i  practice them.
are we called to strive for ideals that can never be attained?

i found no way to address the cognitive dissonance that kept me in a state of spiritual restlessness
until i came upon the writings of 2 19th century russian novelists.
my understanding  of the tension between christian ideals and reality
now consists of part tolstoy (1828-1910) and part dostoevsky. (1821-81)

despite nuggets of wisdom in individual passages, Tol's religious writings in the main
seem erratic and unstable.
he saw the extent of his deviation and little else.
as he diagnosed his own inner workings, what he saw filled him with disgust:
moral failure, hypocrisy, faithlessness.
perhaps for this reason, few people today read his spiritual musings.
as a counselor, he offers more discouragement than hope.
if Tod could hardly help himself, how could he be expected to9 help the rest of us?

in response to such criticism Tol replied,
'don't judge God's holy ideals by my inability to meet them.
don't judge Christ by those of us who imperfectly bear His name.
one passage especially, taken from a personal letter,
shows how Tod responded to such critics toward the end of his life.
it stands as a summary of his spiritual pilgrimage,
at once a ringing affirmation of the truth that he believed with all his heart
and a plangent (resounding loudly, especially with a plaintive sound) appeal for grace
that he never fully realized.

'what bout you, lev nikolayevich, you preach very well, but do you carry out what you preach?
this is the most natural of questions and one that is always asked of me;
it is usually asked victoriously, as though it were a way of stopping my mouth.
'you preach, but how do you live?
and i answer that i do not preach,
that i am not able to preach,
although i passionately wish to.
I CAN PREACH ONLY THROUGH MY ACTIONS
and my actions are vile...
and i answer that i am guilty and vile and worthy of contempt for my failure to carry them out.

at the same time, not in order to justify, but simply in order to explain my lack of consistency, i say:
'look at my present life and then at my former lire
and you will see that i do attempt to carry them out.
it is true that i have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them (christian precepts)
and i am ashamed of this,
but i have failed to fulfil them not because i did not wish to,
but because i was unable to.
teach me how to escape from the net of temptations that surrounds me,
help me
and i will fulfil them:
even without help i wish and hope to fulfil them.

attack me, i do this myself, but attack me rather than the path i follow
and which i point out to anyone who asks me where i think it lies.
if i know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly,
is it any less the right way because i am staggering from side to side!
if it is not the right way, then  show me another way;
but if i stagger and lose the way, you must help me,
you must keep me on the true path,
just as i am ready to support you.
do not mislead me, do not be glad that i have got lost,
do not shout out joyfully: 'look at him! he said he was going home,
but there he is crawling into a bog!
no, do not gloat, but give me your help and support.

..Tol was the first author who, for me, accomplished that most difficult of tasks:
to make good as believable and appealing as evil.

...where Tol wrote bright, sunny novels, Dos wrote brooding, interior ones.
where Tol worked out ascetic schemes for self improvement,
Dos periodically squandered his health and fortune on affairs, alcohol and gambling.
To kept a disciplined work schedule (?)
Dos usually worked all nigh, churning out stories at a frantic pace in order to pay off gambling debts.
thousands of pilgrims made their way to Tol's home, seeking wisdom;
no one would think of going to the disheveled Dos for wisdom.
he was socially awkward.
he managed money so poorly
that sometimes he could not afford the postage to send in a completed novel to the publisher.
he suffered from epilepsy and a grand mal seizure might drive him into despair for days afterward.

Dos made many mistakes in life, but achieved an amazing feat in art.
his novels communicate grace and forgiveness,
the heart of the christian gospel, with Tolstoyan force.
Dos taught me the remedy for the relentless failures exposed by Tol.

early in his life, Dos underwent a virtual resurrection.
he had been arrested for belonging to a group judged treasonous by tsar nichols I, who,
to impress upon the young parlor radicals the gravity of their errors, staged a mock execution.
after spending 8 months in jail awaiting sentence,
suddenly on a frigid morning three days before christmas the conspirators
were ordered out of their cells and carted to a public square
where to their horror an official read the sentence condemning them to death.
they had no time to absorb the news and no possibility of appeal.
a firing squad stood at the ready.
bareheaded, robed in whit burial shrouds, hands bound tightly behind them,
they were paraded through the snow before a gawking crowd.

a clerk pronounced the words, 'the wages of sin is death' to each prisoner
and held out a cross to be kissed.
the first three were selected to die and then tied to posts.
at the very last instant, as the order, 'ready, aim!' was heard,
as drums rumbled and rifles were cocked and lifted to shoulders,
as horseman galloped up with a prearranged message from the tsar:
he would mercifully commute their sentences to hard labor.
Dos, a member opf the nobility, had a sword broken over his head as a sign of shame.
one of the prisoners fell to his knees crying, 'the good tsar! long live our tsar!'
another had a mental collapse from which he never recovered.

in a very different way, Dos never recovered from this experience either.
he had peered into the mas of death
and from that moment life became for him precious beyond all calculation.
back in the prison, he walked up and down the cell, singing in sheer joy of having life restored.
he wrote his brother,k 'never has there seethed in me such an abundant and healthy kind of spiritual life as now
...now my life will change, i shall be born again in a new form.'
he folded away the burial shroud to keep as a memento.

his next ordeal involved transport to siberia.
at the stroke of midnight on christmas day, guards pounded ten pound shackles on his legs
and marched him to an open sledge.
for 18 days, in freezing cold that cause him frostbite, he endured this horse drawn journey.
the convoy paused for a few days in siberia before final dispersal of the prisoners,
and the commandant allowed a visit by three women,
wives of other political prisoners,
who had settled there to be near their husbands.
the three had made it their mission to welcome new prisoners and try to bring them comfort.
one of these, a devout woman who had studied german philosophy and knew the bible almost by heart,
handed Dos a new testament, the only book allowed in the prison.
she whispered that he should search it carefully and inside he found a 10 rubles.

believing that God had given him a second chance to fulfill his calling,
Dos pored over the new testament during his confinement.
'he studied the precious volume from cover to cover,
pondered every world; learned much of it by heart; and never forgot it,
wrote his daughter aimee years later.
'all his works are saturated with it and it is this which gives them their power.'
even after his release, Dos took that new testament with him on his travels
and at home kept it in a drawer in his writing table, always within reach.

Dos spent the next 4 years in hard labor and then another 6 in exile.
at the end of that decade he emerged with unshakable christian convictions,
as expressed in a letter he wrote to the woman who had given him the new testament:
'this Credo is very simple, here it is:
to believe that nothing is more
beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly and more perfect than Christ...
even more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth,
then i would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.

Dos suffered terribly while in prison.
his disordered nerves gave him epilepsy so severe that the seizures
would send him to the ground shrieking, foaming at the mouth, his limbs convulsing.
he often lay ill in the prison hospital, treated for rheumatism as well as the epilepsy.
he sorely missed having literature to read, cringed at the constant fighting and general uproar,
chafed at the shackles and yearned for just a moment of solitude away from the din
-a need, he decided, as urgent as eating and drinking.
in the years in prison, he never received a single letter from his family.

some of his fellow prisoners responded to their punishment with hatred and a thirst for revenge.
remarkably, Dos returned to civilization with a renewed joy in life and optimism about human nature.
he tucked away memories of standing for hours at a gap in the fence, his head resting on the palings,
watching the green grass and the deepening blue of the sky;
one particular work site was 'the only place where we saw God's world- a pure and bright horizon, the free desert steppes whose bareness always made a strange impression on me.

he remembered the kindness of the woman who had given him the new testament and of a little girl who had come running up to him
as he walked in the street with a guard, crying,
'there, poor unfortunate, take a kopek in the name of Christ!'
he kept the kopek coin, like the new testament and the burial shroud, as a memento.
he remembered a period in solitary confinement when each evening a shutter in the cell door opened,
and an anonymous voice whispered: 'courage, brother, we also suffer'.
these small notes of grace interposed in the midst of suffering would find a place in his later novels.

above all, Dos reveled in the sheer generosity of life.
'life is a gift, he wrote several hours after the fake execution.
'life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness....
life is everywhere, life is in ourselves, not in the exterior'.
once he had returned to freedom, he wrote:

love every  leaf, every ray of light.
love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing.
loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all.

i had not expected this surge of joy in Dos\.
i had read his novels during a dark period of my own, after immersing myself in existentialist novels.
i lived in an emotional flatland.
i stood back from other people and judged them, approaching new acquaintances with suspicion.
people could win me over, yes, but it was exactly that, a winning over.
i found my numbed character type in Dos' Underground man,
and then went on to meet his other characters, whose overflowing goodness made them stand out in sharp contrast.
i could not help noting the paradox:
Tol, who had everything, ended up irascible and embittered
while Dos, who lost everything, ended up grateful and exuberant.

prison offered Dos a unique opportunity, which at first seemed a curse:
it forced him to live at close quarters with thieves, murderers, and drunken peasants.
indeed, he later reflected that the worst pain he had endured in prison
was the sheer hatred he confronted in peasant prisoners,
who viewed him as one of the despised upper class.
this revelation came as a great shock, for his aristocratic friends had been leading the reform movement
to bring rights to the very people whom he now found despised them.
his shared life with these prisoners later led to unmatched characterizations in his novels,
such as that of the murderer raskolnikov in Crime and punishment.
D's liberal view of the inherent goodness in humanity
could not account for the pure evil he found in his cell mates
and his theology had to adjust to this new reality.
over time, though, he also glimpsed the image of God in the lowest of these prisoners.
like Tod, he discovered  the remnants of traditional christianity survived in the peasants,
which he began to see as their only hope for a new beginning.
he came to believe that
ONLY THROUGH BEING LOVED IS A PERSON MADE CAPABLE OF LOVE.
Dos saw part of his task as 'raising up the lowly'.
in the brilliant and complex novels he would go on to write,
he did just that, redeeming in the eyes of educated russians a class of peasants and criminal outcasts.

himself, he began to see as the prodigal son in exile, living in a far country among the husks and the swine.
every convict, he concluded, feels with the prodigal that he is not at home, but on a visit.
hope, 'this strange impatient and intense hope',
that something awaits outside the prison walls keeps the prisoner alive, literally.
for Dos, the hope behind bars become a symbol of the eternal hope he had felt in a flash
when he heard the death sentence in the public square.
'we shall be with Christ, he had whispered instinctively to a friend beside him.
('a bit of dust, his atheist friend laconically (using few words) replied).
Dos came to believe it, to believe in immortality, in fact,
as the only way to conceive of this life as anything j but meaningless.

at the time, russian intellectuals were toying with the exciting new philosophy of NIHILISM,
the belief that nothing matters,
that all morality is arbitrary,
that no benevolent God rules over the world,
that all actions are predetermined by our biology,
that love is a physical sensation inseparable from sexual desire.
after his release from exile. Dos countered each of these claims, one by one, in his writings.
he did not so much argue against them as show the consequences of the ideas lived out.
his novel The possessed, for example, recounts the story
(based on a true incident
of committed revolutionaries who killone of their own group
as the most convenient way to resolve differences with him.
Crime and punishment shows the end result of a nietzschean 'extraordinary man'
who lives above standard conventions of morality
and commits two murders simply for the experience.

always, though, a poignant note of grace sounds.
it was in Dos' novels, in fact, that i first began to understand grace,
not as a theological concept but a living reality worked out in a world of ungrace.
although Crime and punishment portrays a despicable human being who commits a despicable crime,
the soothing balm of grace enters raskolnikov's life through the person of the converted prostitute sonia,
who follows him all the way to siberia and leads him to redemption.
'love resurrected them, writes Dos;
'the heart of one contained infinite sources of life for the heart of the other'.
in The idiot, Dos presents a Christ figure in the form of a strange and unpredictable epileptic prince.
quietly, mysteriously, prince myshkin moves among the circles of russia's upper class, exposing their hypocrisy while also illuminating their lives with goodness and truth.
The idiot's final scene presents perhaps the most moving depiction of grace in all of literature:
the 'idiot' prince compassionately embracing the man who has just killed the woman he loved.

in a world ruled by law, grace stands as a sign of contradiction.
we want fairness:
the gospel gives us an innocent man nailed to a cross who cries out, 'Father, forgive them'.
we want respectability;
the gospel elevates tax collectors, prodigals and samaritans.
we want success;
the gospel reverses the terms, moving the poor and downtrodden to the head of the line
and the wealthy and famous to the rear.
having embraced Christ in the hellhole of a siberian prison,
among cellmates who mocked his infirmities and despised his advantages,
Dos understood grace at its most contradictory.
in his novels it enters stealthily, without warning,
silencing the skeptics and disarming the cynics.
they think they have life figured out until suddenly
an encounter with pure grace leaves them breathless.

it had happened to Dos himself.
racked with debts from gambling and a failed magazine venture,
he had fallen for the scheme of an unscrupulous publisher, who would obtain copyrights to all his past work
if he did not produce a new novel by a certain date.
Dos procrastinated, suffering from writer's block until only three weeks remained before the deadline.
the task seemed impossible and he despaired of life until
anna, a 19 year old stenographer, showed up to help him.
having suffered an epileptic seizure a few days before, he was in a foul mood.
he treated her harshly at first, scolded her and complained about her speed.
she wrote down his every word, working through the night,
then went home to copy it over and returned it with an edited manuscript in hand the next day.
with such superhuman efforts, she won him over and coaxed out of him a novel, The gambler,
which was delivered two hours before the deadline.

by then Dos had fully recognized his stenographer's charms and proposed marriage.
anna felt no physical attraction toward him, an unkempt widower 25 years her senior
with a notorious weakness for alcohol and gambling.
yet she pitied him and knew he needed her.
at considerable personal sacrifice, she agreed to the match,
moved in to organize his career and household,
and gave him 15 years of happiness-'The Miraculous Years', his biographer calls them
for in that period Dos produced all his masterpieces.

...when i first read The brothers karamazov, i realized that i was standing with ivan.
i had a long list of complaints about the world.
i had sound arguments against Go's injustice and unfairness.
i felt anger and resentment against God.
to quote Dos, 'can't i simply be devoured without being expected to praise what devours me?'
tortured by the lack of love in the world, i was nevertheless doing nothing about it.
i lacked alyosha's instinct for common goodness, for a compassionate response.

it was then i began to see what Dos had learned in prison:
THE GOSPEL OF GRACE INFILTRATES THIS WORLD
NOT PRIMARILY THROUGH WORDS AND RATIONAL ARGUMENTS
BUT THROUGH DEEDS, THROUGH LOVE.
the people i was learning to admire most, such as paul brand and robert coles,
were expressing their faith through action, incarnationally.
as i traveled to other countries-brazil, nepal, the philippines, kenya
-i found humble people who each day faced human problems more extreme than i could imagine
and yet who responded not with paralysis or resentment but with compassion and love.
Dos showed me the logical consequences of a life based on nihilism and doubt;
living christian servants showed me the logical consequences of a life based on faith and love.
to follow Jesus, i learned, does not mean to solve every human problem
-Christ Himself did not attempt that
-but rather to respond as He did , against all reason
to dispense grace and love to those who deserve it least.

by and large, the intellectuals in Dos' day did not find him convincing.
his faith in the latent christianity in the lower classes,
his appeal to charity and compassion,
his distrust of the latest theories of social engineering
- these exposed him as an old fashioned moralist,
wholly unable to address the problems of modern russia.
they chose another path, the path of a morality based on utilitarianism, cut loose from transcendence.
'WITHOUT GOD EVERYTHING IS PERMITED', Dos warned in The brothers karamazov.
the 20th century would demonstrate just how prescient Dos had been.
'MAN MUST BOW DOWN TO SOMETHING', Dos also wrote
in the case of 20th century russia, human beings chose to bow down to each other,
enshrining lenin in a mausoleum and treating marx and stalin like prophets.
atheists, thy worshiped man-Gods rather than a God-man,
with results more tragic than any our planet had before seen.

in his 1983 templeton address, 102 years after Dos death, alexander solzhenitsyn
reviewed the tragic history of russia in the 20th century.
it was through reading Dos, Sol reports elsewhere, that he first began to understand
THE PRIMACY OF THE SPIRITUAL OVER THE MATERIAL.
that led the way to a conversion experience, also in a prison camp,
which changed the course of his life and ultimately affected the course of his nation.
this is what he said in the templeton address:

'over half a century ago, while i was still a child, i recall hearing a number of older people
offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen russia:
'MEN HAVE FORGOTTEN GOD; THAT'S WHY ALL THIS HAS HAPPENED'.
since then i have spent well nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution;
in the process i have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies.
and have already contributed 8 volumes of my own
toward the effort of clearing away the ruble left by that upheaval.
but if i were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution
that swallowed up some 60,000,000j of our people, i could not put it more accurately than to repeat:
'men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'

why doesn't it work?
i began with this question about the christian church, the source of many of my underlying doubts.
christian ideals attract admiration even from unbelievers,
yet what good are those ideals if i cannot put them into practice?
two great russian thinkers came up with different answers to this stumbling block of faith.
Tol founded his philosophy on a belief  in the perfectibility of human nature.
id doesn't work because we don't try hard enough, he concluded,
though he tried harder than anyone and never managed to resolve the contradictions with himself,
let alone anyone else.
10 years in siberia purged Dos of any such delusion:
'in every man, of course, a demon lies hidden', said his character ivan karamazov.
he had no quarreled with Tol on the ideal for which russia should strive,
but many differences on the path to get there.

while exiled in siberia and before his marriage to anna,
Dos had impulsively married a widow with a young son.
they returned to st. petersburg together, but it was a marriage no happier than Tol's.

feodor's epilepsy and general slovenliness repulsed marya.
she fell into bouts of hysterical rage, which only made his epilepsy worse.
he took long trips to europe partly in search of a cure for his ailment,
but partly to get away from her.
the two had mad a bad match.

after 7 years of marriage, marya Dos died of tuberculosis.
all too characteristically, he husband had spent much of the time during her illness
touring europe with a 20 year old mistress.
now, having returned for her death, he sat in the room beside her corpse,
overcome with nostalgia over their happier times together,
grief over her death and remorse over his own behavior.
all night he kept a vigil beside her bier, making jottings by candlelight.
'masha is lying on the table, he began writing. 'will i ever see masha again?'

his melancholy reflections that night led to an odd discussion of immortality.
in answering the question of whether he will ever see his wife again, Dos ignores traditional arguments
-from the resurrection of Jesus, say or the need to balance the scales of justice-
and turns the document into a kind of personal confession.
no one lives up to the ideal, he admits.
no one can perfectly love his neighbor as himself.
no one can fulfill the law of Christ.
God cannot ask so much and be satisfied with so little.
we are made for that which is too big for us.
it is for this very reason he concludes, that he must believe in an afterlife.
without such a belief, our futile struggle to fulfill the law of Christ would have no point.
it is our very longing, our failure, our sense of incompleteness
that forces us to throw ourselves on God's mercy.
our imperfection in this life calls for another, more complete realization of that ideal.

thus Dos adds a note of wistful longing, of grace, to the christian ideals he shared with Tol.
today, i claim these tow russians as my spiritual guides
because they help answer my underlying doubts by throwing light on a central paradox of the christian life.
from Tol i learn the need to look inside, to the kingdom of God that is within me.
in that glance, i see how miserably i fall short of the high ideals of the gospel.
but from Dos i learn the full extent of grace.
not only the kingdom of God is within me; God Himself dwells there.
'where sin increased, grace increased all the more'. is how the apostle paul expressed it in romans.

there is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel
and the grim reality of ourselves:
 to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to.
(note: does not luke 13.24 point us to a continual agonizing for something that is 'impossible' here..
while resting in what Christ has done for us, having come to live in us?)
Tol got it halfway right: anything that makes me feel comfort with God's moral standard,
anything that makes me feel, 'at last i have arrived', is a cruel deception.
Dos got the other half right: anything that makes me feel discomfort with God's forgiving love
is also a cruel deception.
'ther is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus', paul insisted....

absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that contrapuntal message from russian novelists,
i returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching.
in his response to the rich young ruler, in the parable of the good samaritan,
in his comments about divorce, money or any other moral issue, Jesus never lowered God's ideal.
'be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect, He said.
'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind'.
not Tol, not francis of assisi or mother teresa, not anyone has completely complied with those commands.

yet the same Jesus tenderly offered absolute grace, perhaps the greatest distinctive of the christian faith.
God loves us not because of who we are and what we have done, but because of who God is.
grace flows to all who accept it.
Jesus forgave the adulteress,
a thief on a cross,
a disciple who had denied ever knowing Him.
grace is absolute, all encompassing.
it extends even to the people who nailed Jesus to the cross:
'Father, forgive the, for they do not know what they are doing'
were among the last words He spoke on earth.

i read the new testament, especially passages such as the sermon on the mount,
with a different spirit now than in my adolescence.
Jesus did not proclaim these exalted words so that we would, Tolstoy-like,
furrow our brows in despair over our failure to achieve perfection.
he proclaimed them to impart to us
GOD'S IDEAL TOWARD WHICH WE SHOULD NEVER STOP STRIVING
and also to show the
NONE OF US WILL EVER REACH THAT IDEAL.
the sermon on the mount forces us to recognize the great distance between God and us
and any attempt to reduce that distance by somehow moderating its demands misses the point altogether.
WE ARE ALL DESPERATE
and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God.
having fallen from the absolute ideal, as Tol did,
we have nowhere to land but with Dos, in the safety net of absolute grace.