Agnology - a study in human ignorance

The grandfather of modernity, Rene Descartes, began his modern project with the idea that all men should be able to agree with one another. Abstract reason—available to every man—was supposed to provide the means to attain this universal agreement. Men no longer needed the Church, or some external authority, to tell them to behave. And yet, several generations and bloody revolutions later, some authors began to point out how miserably Reason had failed as a peacekeeper. Two such authors were Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). Modernity, as they told the story, had transferred man’s moral responsibility from his neighbor and directed it toward the individual himself or—worse—to a Cause. Both Dickens and Dostoevsky suggest in their respective novels, A Tale of Two Cities and The Brothers Karamazov, that the only way to reestablish moral community in this broken world is to restore an ethic of mutual and personal self-sacrifice against the impersonal ethic of the Enlightenment. Ultimately, one must choose between “Reason” and sacrifice.

So we were all damned to hell last week. It falls to Zosima to bring us out. Of course—the question is—does Dostoevsky’s account of Zosima provide the answer to Ivan and the Inquisitor’s devastating critique of faith in the previous section. Apparently, Dostoevsky worried about the adequacy of his response, too. Robin Feuer Miller points out that right before the serial portion of his section “The Russian Monk” was due to be released, he wrote to a friend doubting whether his Grand Inquisitor blasphemy would be answered well enough by the holy monk. What I think we need to realize here at the very beginning is that the answer Zosima is supposed to give is not Euclidean. The kiss of Christ and Alyosha which we talked about last week should clue us in—Dostoevsky is not going to provide a logical mock-trial-like rebuttal to the atheist’s charges. Dostoevsky rather recognizes that both the argument for and the argument against faith are ultimately stories. Ivan’s arguments culminate in “prose poem.” And Zosima life story acts in the same way. In fact, Dostoevsky seems to go out of his way to highlight the narrative aspect of his argument: commenting again and again that his account was told to him, and he cannot be sure the words he recounts are true to what was originally said.