Dostoevsky

There's this class I'm taking right now called Christian Thought and Culture (often shorted to CTC, but acronyms make me uncomfortable). As is typical with courses here at Regent College, there is a large amount of reading to do. But the great part about this class is that every student is allowed to read 400 pages of basically anything they like (as related to the course, of course). So as part of this 400 pages I decided to pick up and read The Brothers Karamazov by everyone's favourite Russian, Fyodor Dostoevsky. I read book five of the Book, which is entitled "Pro and Contra" and is perhaps the most brilliant chapter of any book ever written. Perhaps. It contains the infamous episode in which Alyosha meets with his older, philosophically bent brother Ivan at a restaurant and over a bowl of fish soup Ivan tells a poem he made up about "The Grand Inquisitor." I won't get into all the details of the conversation (you can and probably should read it for yourself), but there is one statement by Ivan which hit me and got me thinking and which may or may not get you thinking. If nothing else this is a beautiful, if tragic, bit of, well, I don't know the word for it. Just listen.

I'm convinced like a child that the wounds will heal and their traces will fade away, that all the offensive and comical spectacle of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like a horrible and odious invention of the feeble and infinitely puny Euclidean mind of man, and that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will happen and come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, that it will allay all bitter resentments, that it will atone for all men's crimes, all the blood they have shed. It will suffice not only for the forgiveness but also for the justification of everything that has ever happened to men. Well, let it, let it all be and come to pass, but I don't accept it and I won't accept it! Let even the parallel lines meet and let me see them meet, myself - I shall see and I shall say that they've met, but I still won't accept it. That is the heart of the matter, so far as I'm concerned, Alyosha. That is where I stand.

What a hopeless statement. And yet some days I come to the same conclusion. I've had the education. I know all about God's creation of this wonderful universe. I know about Christ's death on the cross what that means. I know that he will come again in glory to judge and to fully renew the cosmos. This all I know. But some days I just don't feel like accepting it. It may all be true, in fact, I'm pretty sure it is, but sometimes I just feel like saying, "So what?" Intellectually it's all very real. Its all been explained and proved and whatnot else. But can I accept it? Perhaps I'm just too obstinate and rebellious, too proud to accept even the greatest of all gifts. Why? I don't know. Its just this sense, this mood which broods deep down inside me and which sometimes breaks the surface of my consciousness. Can I accept all that God has done and will do? Or do I refuse and proceed on my own.
Here I seem to have stumbled upon that which can finally separate us from God. Proud obstinacy which simply refuses all that is good in exchange for, well, me, I guess. This seems to be C. S. Lewis's conclusion in The Great Divorce. He describes Napolean living light years away from any hope for life, so obsessed with his own self to the exclusion of all others and to the Other. I guess this is why humility is so profoundly important in our ascent to God. That we open ourselves to the good which does not come from our own action. For it was humility which kept silent the twelve as the Son of God stooped to wash their feet. Some days we just need to sit silently and allow Christ to wash us. To accept his humble action in humility...