Episode #222 ... Dostoevsky - Love in The Brothers Karamazov

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So today, we're gonna be talking about the book, The Brothers Karamazov, which means, among other things, we're gonna be talking today about the faith of Dostoevsky. Faith was a big part of how he lived his life, where if you're someone that spent many years studying him, you know, reading the journals, the letters, the notes of Dostoevsky, people often describe his view of faith as a kind of existential tragic form of Christianity. That's the kind of thing they'll say when trying to describe his faith in all its layers, which to a modern person who just hears that, especially if you haven't listened to these last four episodes we've done building to this point, that can sound on the surface like it's kind of an oxymoron. Like tragic Christianity, Existential questions. I mean, isn't Christianity the thing you believe in so you don't gotta be in agony with existential dread every day? I mean, someone could say that when it comes to how most people seem to be using this Christianity thing, Jesus was basically a a fidget spinner that had 12 disciples. I mean, how can that ever be anything but something that helps people cope with a painful reality they can't fully affirm? Well, if you wanna understand where he's coming from with his faith, first thing we gotta make sure we're doing is not reducing Christianity and all of religion for that matter to just a superficial lazy kind of religion that gives people easy answers. Certainly plenty of people out there you could find that'll use religion like this, but Dostoevsky and many other people are not this kind of Christian. And it's understandable. Sometimes just as humans, we'll take the worst example of something we've seen in the world and we'll make the entire thing into the worst things we've seen from it. But out of respect to the history of people who have thought about stuff on this planet, you know, if we wanna honor the ideas here with religion being a big part of what human thought has been over the years, well, let's make a pact to try not to do that with religion, at least for this conversation today. In fact, if you remember the episode we just did before we started the series where we talked about Keiji Nishitani and his views on the value of a deeply religious quest, the truth is that there's a similarity to the ways that Nishitani saw religion and the ways that Dostoevsky saw religion. One way to think about it is that Russian Orthodox Christianity, far from being some institution that Dostoevsky says we should blindly commit ourselves to, it's more accurate to say that Christianity gave Dostoevsky a language he could use to navigate the purpose he served in a larger network of being. And this religious path that he walked was very deep. It was tragic. It was existential. …