{"id":6417,"date":"2017-07-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-07-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/2017\/07\/01\/the-burden-of-freedom\/"},"modified":"2017-07-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-07-01T00:00:00","slug":"the-burden-of-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/2017\/07\/01\/the-burden-of-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"The Burden of Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

In book five of The Brothers Karamazov, <\/em>in the section \u201cThe Grand Inquisitor,\u201d the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) has Jesus return to earth in the sixteenth century, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. That day \u201calmost a hundred heretics had, for the greater glory of God<\/em>, been burnt by the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor.\u201d People recognize Jesus and mob Him, but the Grand Inquisitor has Him arrested and locked in a dungeon. He visits the dungeon and harangues Jesus for His gift of freedom of choice. Humans don\u2019t appreciate it, he says. To be sure, they are tormented by it. It\u2019s a great burden for them to bear. It is not freedom, asserts the Grand Inquisitor, but bread and security, that people truly desire.<\/p>\n

\tAgain, continued the Grand Inquisitor, people yearn for authority. That\u2019s why they readily surrender the gift of freedom and eagerly submit to superior power and worship it. Unable to shoulder the burden of freedom, they seek refuge in mass worship and unanimously hold dogmas. \u201cThis craving for community <\/em>of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they\u2019ve slain each other with the sword.\u201d The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that only three powers can satisfy the servile humankind—\u201cbread,\u201d \u201cmystery,\u201d and \u201cauthority.\u201d But Jesus had rejected all three in the wilderness. What He had rejected, however, the church had accepted and used to prodigious advantage.1<\/sup> \u201cAlways in the name of Christ,\u201d as Ren\u00e9 Girard ironically put it, \u201cbut in a spirit contrary to his—for the advent of an earthly kingdom more in keeping with the limitations of human nature.\u201d2<\/sup><\/p>\n

\tOr, in the Grand Inquisitor\u2019s own words: \u201cWe have corrected Your work. . . . And men rejoiced that they were again led like a flock, and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering, was, at last lifted from their hearts. . . . Why have You come now to hinder us?\u201d demanded the Grand Inquisitor.3<\/sup> In a clear allusion to Jesus\u2019 trial, Dostoyevsky has Him silent throughout, thereby tacitly directing the reader to the gospel, to Jesus\u2019 nonviolence and self-sacrificing love. \u201cFor me,\u201d as he put it in A Writer\u2019s Diary<\/em>, \u201cthe moral model and ideal is given: Christ. I ask, Would He have burned heretics? No. So that means burning heretics is an immoral act.\u201d4<\/sup> Not only did Dostoyevsky hold Christ as the ideal model—the crux of his masterpieces was that imitating Christ\u2019s self-sacrificing love was the only solution to the existential human problems in modern society.<\/p>\n

\tOf these, the problem of freedom or of individual liberty was fundamental. Starting with the Protestant Reformation, modernization shattered traditional pillars and structures. By the nineteenth century the center of gravity had shifted from society to the individual. All modern freedoms: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from arbitrary arrest, were entrenched in the nineteenth century, urgently raising the specter of social anarchy and moral corruption. The idea of the decline or crisis of Western civilization first registered in the nineteenth century. Too much freedom, it was feared, led to anarchy and licentiousness. And liberalism, the movement that sought more liberty, or freedom from restraint and tradition, came to be viewed as a menace to morality and social order, a view seemingly validated by the European revolutions of 1848-1849.<\/p>\n

\tThese revolutions (which forced the pope to flee Rome and led to the creation of the Italian Republic) presaged the Syllabus of Errors<\/em> (1864), the encyclical that condemned the 80 \u201cerrors\u201d afflicting the modern world. And the last error of thought, epitomizing all 80, was that \u201cthe Roman pontiff can and should reconcile with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation.\u201d5<\/sup> With this encyclical the pope cemented the Catholic Church\u2019s alliance with the reactionary parties wishing to restore the despotism of the ancient regime. Sharply opposing them were radical liberals and socialists seeking to complete the ideals of the French Revolution.<\/p>\n

\tThe arguments for and against freedom, mainly by French and German intellectuals, which flowed from the clash between the forces of reaction and revolution, supplied the materials for Dostoyevsky\u2019s literary masterpieces. Like his fellow radical Russian intellectuals, Dostoyevsky grew up in a world dominated by Western philosophy. But he broke away after his imprisonment in Siberia. Attacking the Westernized Russian intelligentsia, especially the radical nihilists who denied free will and reduced human motivation to rational self-interest, he formulated a Christian moral vision that put a high premium on freedom and Christ\u2019s selfless love.<\/p>\n

\tIn Notes From the Underground<\/em> (1864) Dostoyevsky has a nameless narrator, the Underground Man, who met all the conditions that, according to the Russian intelligentsia, made him the epitome of \u201ca rational egoist\u201d: revolt against rationalism, utilitarianism, socialism, and liberalism. He brilliantly showed him as torn apart by pungent passions and an obstinate will that made him knowingly deceive himself and self-destructively use reason in the service of unreason.<\/p>\n

\tFor Dostoyevsky, this irrationalism is a universal human problem. \u201cWhat are we to do,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwith the millions of facts showing that people knowingly<\/em>, that is fully aware of their real advantage, have put it aside and rushed off unto another road.\u201d That people acted \u201cagainst the laws of reason [rassudok<\/em>], against their own advantage;\u201d refuted the \u201claw of rational self-interest.\u201d6<\/sup> As such, it is \u201cdescriptively false as a theory of behavior.\u201d7<\/sup> It\u2019s false, as Dostoyevsky hauntingly showed through his psychologically tormented characters, because it overlooks the spiritual dimension of humanity, the evil deeply rooted in human nature.<\/p>\n

\tIronically, many Western critics of Dostoyevsky, blinded by the same rationalistic presuppositions that he inveighed against, have overlooked or minimized the spiritual dimension of his work. This is unfortunate. His Christian moral vision, like that of Kierkegaard, whom he never knew, was polemically formulated in response to the atheistic, rationalistic, and nihilistic ideological visions that make up our modern present. And his genius was to expose the inner existential conflict, the war between good and evil, within which these ideological visions were concocted.8<\/sup> For Dostoyevsky, as said in The Brothers Karamazov<\/em>, \u201cGod and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.\u201d9<\/sup> Indeed, in The Possessed <\/em>(or The Devils<\/em>), a chilling vision of hubris, self-contradiction, treachery, mayhem, murder, and suicide, he attributed the ideological choices made by the radicals to the devil\u2019s deception or demonic possession. As we know, The Possessed<\/em> was an uncannily accurate prophecy of the grotesque violence, despotism and spiritual deformations of the Russian Revolution.<\/p>\n

\tThis makes Dostoyevsky\u2019s masterpieces especially relevant for us. For the \u201cidentity crisis\u201d of his conflicted nihilistic characters is identical to the one afflicting many in the West today. And like nineteenth-century Russia, it\u2019s a grave threat to freedom. It has all the totalitarian impulses that produced the Bolshevik Revolution. Indeed, in \u201cThe Grand Inquisitor\u201d Dostoyevsky predicted the collapse of Western liberalism and the return of Western nations to Catholicism, to reestablish a universal medieval-like societas perfecta<\/em>. As put by the Grand Inquisitor: \u201cMankind as a whole has always striven to organize a universal state.\u201d Accordingly, a time will come when \u201cfreedom, free thought, and science will lead them [Western nations] into such straits . . ., [they] will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: \u2018Yes, you were right, . . . and we come back to you, save us from ourselves.\u2019\u201d10<\/sup><\/p>\n

\tThis prediction was not mere artistic imaginativeness on Dostoyevsky\u2019s part. It was based on the biblical book of Revelation. Again from the Grand Inquisitor: \u201cAges are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism. But then the beast will crawl to us and lick our feet and spatter them with tears of blood. And we shall sit upon the beast and raise the cup, and on it will be written, \u2018Mystery.\u2019\u201d (This is a direct allusion to Revelation 13 and 17.) Regarding Protestants, \u201cthe flock will come together again and will submit once more.\u201d 11<\/sup> Interestingly, Ellen G. White, also a nineteenth-century writer, predicted the reunion, or common cause, of Protestantism and Catholicism, and that it will be enabled by mystery and magic, or \u201cspiritualism.\u201d12<\/sup><\/p>\n

\tThat is why, according to the Grand Inquisitor, \u201cthey [Western nations] will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us\u201d (an allusion to Revelation 13:3). \u201cWe shall tell them that every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission.\u201d In a sign of willful demonic self-delusion, the Grand Inquisitor knows that his rebellion was prophesied in Revelation 17:16. \u201cWe are told that the harlot who sits upon the beast, and holds in her hands the mystery<\/em>, shall be put to shame, that the weak will rise up again and will rend her royal purple and will strip naked her loathsome body. But then l [Grand Inquisitor]\u201d \u201cwill stand up before Thee [God] . . . and say: \u2018Judge us if Thou canst and darest.\u2019\u201d13<\/sup><\/p>\n

\tFor Dostoyevsky the Grand Inquisitor\u2019s God-defying arrogance was identical to the blatant atheism of radical socialists. Both arrogated to themselves divine prerogatives: they deified themselves. They had \u201csuccumbed to the Devil\u2019s third temptation\u201d of an earthly kingdom based on human material interests,14<\/sup> and so had liberalism. That\u2019s why it was doomed. As Shatov put it in The Possessed:<\/em> \u201cNot one single nation . . . has, yet, based its life on reason and science\u201d \u201cbecause \u2018the search for God\u2019 is unquenchable. . . . It is the force of an incessant and unwavering affirmation of life and denial of death.\u201d And he concluded, \u201cThere has never yet existed a people without religion—that is, without a concept of good and evil.\u201d15<\/sup><\/p>\n

\tTocqueville made the same point. \u201cIn times of fervor it sometimes happens that men abandon their religion, but they only escape from its yoke in order to submit to that of another. Faith changes its allegiance but does not die.\u201d16<\/sup> To be sure, this can be seen in the reappearance in secular ideologies, albeit in abstract debased form, of moral antimonies and specters of God and the devil. It is curiously ironic, as Dostoyevsky showed, that we deny God\u2019s existence but readily worship man-gods (the Stalins and Hitlers), just as we deny the devil\u2019s existence but blithely demonize the Other. If this involuntarily attests to the inescapable reality of God and the devil, then the lesson of Dostoyevsky\u2019s masterpieces is that it is impossible for us to get rid of God and the devil and go \u201cbeyond good and evil,\u201d as Nietzsche advocated.<\/p>\n

\tGoing beyond \u201cgood and evil\u201d is not only what Communism and Fascism did, but also Anglo-American liberalism when, in the 1960s, under the spell of French Nietzscheanism or postmodernism, it made the individual the arbiter of good and evil, or a god, to put it bluntly. This point requires emphasis. Unlike European liberalism that grew out of the French Revolution and was based on reason and decidedly anti-Christian, Anglo-American liberalism grew out of the Puritan Revolution, and was based on the individual\u2019s direct relationship with God. Locke, John Milton, Richard Price, and other prominent thinkers used the Bible to elucidate \u201cthe meaning of English liberty in contradiction to Catholic practices and principles [viewed as] paradigmatic of unfreedom itself.\u201d17<\/sup> In other words, they stood fully within the Protestant tradition, which sought to purify rather than destroy Christianity—just like the French philosophes<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\tAs Tocqueville noted, the crucial political consequence of staying within the Christian vision is \u201camong the Anglo-Americans,\u201d that \u201cthe human spirit never sees an unlimited field before itself; however bold it is, from time to time it feels that it must halt before insurmountable barriers.\u201d18<\/sup> If the ultimate barrier is God, then without Him \u201ceverything is permitted,\u201d as Dostoyevsky famously noted. Indeed, the Anglo-American credo of limited government is inseparably linked to belief in God and the experience of both religious and political absolutism. Hear John Cotton (1584-1652): \u201cLet all the world learn to give mortal man no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will. . . . It is necessary that all power that is on earth be limited, church power or other.\u201d19<\/sup> To be sure, for the limits it set on human pretensions or ambitions Tocqueville called \u201creligion [Protestantism], which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, . . . the first of [their] political institutions.\u201d20<\/sup><\/p>\n

\tThat is why, writing in 1835, he noted that \u201cup till now no one in the United States has dared to profess the maxim that everything is allowed in the interests of society, an impious maxim apparently invented . . . to legitimatize every future tyrant.\u201d21<\/sup> For the United States the future has arrived. To put it bluntly, we are now witnessing the decadence, the broad moral breakdown of American society visible in its political life.<\/p>\n

\tWhile postmodernism has corrupted and blinded liberals, the sanctimonious politics of cultural despair, and the nostalgia of a past that never was, has done the same to conservatives. But above all, the moral breakdown issues from the advanced decomposition of American Christianity, its deformation of the gospel into a form of psychotherapy and the church into an appendage of American culture and politics. I am recalling here Fritz Stern\u2019s perceptive diagnosis of the \u201csilent secularization of Protestant Germany that left an unacknowledged spiritual vacuum in which pseudo-religions [with false prophets and false messiahs] could flourish.\u201d22<\/sup><\/p>\n

\tAmerica—indeed, Western democracy—needs a religious revival, another Reformation. The underground pathologies, the existential anxieties and pungent passions laid bare in 2016, cannot be solved by reason or politically. Indeed, they strikingly parallel those Dostoyevsky diagnosed. As he argued, the only remedy is moral regeneration based on Christ\u2019s self-sacrificing love. Ominously, his prophecy of the collapse of liberalism is being fulfilled before our very eyes.<\/p>\n

\tLiberalism is etymologically related to liberty. For the first liberty from which all modern liberties emanated is religious liberty, the freedom to worship God according to one\u2019s conscience. True, modern liberties have degenerated into license, but it is because they were severed from the divine root. Reconnect them, and liberalism will be saved from collapse. Of course, the alternative is to surrender liberty to the Grand Inquisitor. But this is a choice that each one of us has to make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In book five of The Brothers Karamazov, in the section \u201cThe Grand Inquisitor,\u201d the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) has Jesus return to earth in the sixteenth century, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. That day \u201calmost a hundred heretics had, for the greater glory of God, been burnt by the cardinal, the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[150],"class_list":["post-6417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-july-august-2017","tag-july-august-2017"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}