I had returned to Wellington to visit a Samoan girl I had fallen for the year before while at university, but the relationship was on the rocks and she kicked me out of her apartment after a few days. With a month to kill before my flight home, and more or less adrift, I took the ferry over to Picton and began hitchhiking the 1,000km to Invercargill, on the southernmost tip of the South Island. I spent a few nights in a Trappist monastery, and a hostel here and there. At one point I slept in the doorway of a public bathroom on the beach, cooking my dinner on a small alcohol stove to escape the wind. I remember a small child going to use the bathroom being startled that there was someone lying there. I was, for all intents and purposes, a vagrant.
I spent about a week on the horse farm somewhere between Christchurch and Timaru. Most people in New Zealand are very laid back and friendly, and after I encountered the farmer she invited me to stay in a shed on her property. I would sit on the porch and drink tea, hang my laundry, walk into town for the newspaper, and read books. I was more or less alone, and more or less adrift. Yes, I was traveling, but I was also searching. I had been Catholic for about three years and had struggled to leave my old life behind. I still remember lying in bed, the light of dusk coming through the one window of the shed, and reading Dostoevsky's words in The Grand Inquisitor:
“I tell you that man has no more tormenting care than to find someone to whom he can hand over as quickly as possible that gift of freedom with which the miserable creature is born. But he alone can take over the freedom of men who appeases their conscience. With bread you were given an indisputable banner: give man bread and he will bow down to you, for there is nothing more indisputable than bread. But if at the same time someone else takes over his conscience - oh, then he will even throw down your bread and follow him who has seduced his conscience. In this you were right. For the mystery of man's being is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him. That is so, but what came of it? Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it still more for them! Did you forget that peace and even death are dearer to man than free choice in the knowledge of good and evil? There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either. And so, instead of a firm foundation for appeasing human conscience once and for all, you chose everything that was unusual, enigmatic, and indefinite, you chose everything that was beyond men's strength, and thereby acted as if you did not love them at all - and who did this? He who came to give his life for them! Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it and forever burdened the kingdom of the human soul with its torments. You desired the free love of man, that he should follow you freely. seduced and captivated by you. Instead of the firm ancient law, men had henceforth to decide for himself, with a free heart, what is good and what is evil, having only your image before him as a guide - but did it not occur to you that he would eventually reject and dispute even your image and your truth if he was oppressed by so terrible a burden as freedom of choice? They will finally cry out that the truth is not in you, for it was impossible to leave them in greater confusion and torment than you did, abandoning them to so many cares and insoluble problems. Thus you yourself laid the foundation for the destruction of your own kingdom, and do not blame anyone else for it.”
Kornelije Kvas wrote that Bakhtin’s theory of "the polyphonic novel and Dostoevsky’s dialogicness of narration postulates the non-existence of the 'final' word, which is why the thoughts, emotions and experiences of the world of the narrator and his/her characters are reflected through the words of another, with which they can never fully blend." Though Dostoevsky was influenced by his Orthodox Christian upbringing, and was pious in his own right, the polyphony that is evident in his work laid the groundwork for his influence on Existentialists like Sartre and Nietzsche. Though fond of the Christ of the New Testament, he described himself as a "child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave." He also wrote that "even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth." He essentially created his own belief system that was not tethered to dogmatic constructs, and he idealized the loving Christ in the way a modern day (though much more childishly) Joseph Girzone has in the Joshua books.
Was it any wonder Dostoevsky spoke to me at this untethered point in my life? I was in a foreign country, thousands of miles from home, and I couldn't even tell you why or what I was doing. Like Dostoevsky, I was probably sympathetic to Christian Socialism at that point, seeing in the monastic ideal the embodiment of what was possible. If Christ came back to earth, as he did in The Grand Inquisitor, he would be cast out once again, and then the question would become--would I follow him off the Barque.
An interesting event happened after I resumed my journey southwards, though. I eventually met a family in Dunedin, a Catholic family, who took me into their home. They were devout and joyful. They were a little puzzled by my listlessness, but lovingly 'adopted' me for a week or so and I got a glimpse of the "order" that family life prescribes to those in it. You live under a roof, with expectations, and a bond of cohesion. You go to Mass together, you eat together, you sign on to what the Church teaches. You are a domestic church in and of yourself, and you are one of millions across the globe with a common creed, common prayer before meals, common goal to get one another to Heaven. You love one another in a communion of persons, just as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are a communion of Persons. Family life mirrors that of the order of the Universe.
There is a loneliness in cobbling together your own belief system, whether quasi-Christian/anti-dogmatic, syncretist, universalist, or otherwise. When your 'beliefs' are idiosyncratic, you become a church of one. You are like a traveler adrift, not part of a community, a sarabaite or gyrovague, "the most detestable of all monks" as St. Benedict said,
"who with no experience to guide them, no rule to try them as gold is tried in a furnace (Prov 27:21), have a character as soft as lead. Still loyal to the world by their actions, they clearly lie to God by their tonsure. Two or three together, or even alone, without a shepherd, they pen themselves up in their own sheepfolds, not the Lord’s. Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy. Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden...who spend their entire lives drifting from region to region, staying as guests for three or four days in different monasteries. Always on the move, they never settle down, and are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites." (Rule, Ch 1)
In the narrative in the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky inverts the temptations of Christ, so that The Grand Inquisitor (the Church) said that Christ should have given people no choice, and instead taken power and given people security instead of freedom. That way, the same people who were too weak to follow Christ to begin with would still be damned, but at least they could have happiness and security on Earth, rather than the impossible burden of moral freedom. The Grand Inquisitor says that the Church has now undertaken to correct Christ’s mistake. The Church is taking away freedom of choice and replacing it with security. Thus, the Grand Inquisitor must keep Christ in prison, because if Christ were allowed to go free, he might undermine the Church’s work to lift the burden of free will from mankind.
Obviously Dostoevsky was critical of the (Catholic) Church, and imagined a Christ freed from the constraints of dogmatism (ie, his idealization of Christian Socialism). Of course, I am not a literary scholar, and much of the history of Russia in the 19th century makes any analysis I can make inadequate. Dostoevsky had an immense respect for freedom and wrestled with it his whole life. But in a kind of ignostic way, this greatest gift (of God, on which love in its truest sense is dependent) was also his greatest burden.
But my takeaway is this: You can only do your own thing for so long before you realize that your adrift-ness is the result of your refusal to sign on to something where you can grow, not any great misunderstood martyrdom or idolized man viz-a-viz the world. To refuse to subject your will, your freedom, and your conscience to something greater than yourself--be it dogmatic constitutions or the permanence of family life--you will always be asking the existential questions without answers.
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