Paying Attention To The Sky

On the occasion of  Rowan Williams publishing Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus wrote a few brief comments in First Things. He praised Williams for his impressive command of Dostoevsky scholarship, and his ability to correct translations when he thought it was called for. Greatly influenced, as all Dostoevsky scholars were, by Michael Bakhtin’s work, published in English in 1984 as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Williams urged his readers to move beyond the countless books claiming that Dostoevsky’s novels are about wrestling with the problem of belief or unbelief in the existence of God. Both Neuhaus and Williams felt Dostoevsky settled that question a long time ago. Writing toward the very end of his life in 1881, Dostoevsky had declared, “It is not as a child that I believe in Christ and confess him. My hosanna has passed through a great crucible of doubt.”

Neuhaus continues: “The great question addressed in multiple ways by Dostoevsky was this: What does it mean to believe in Christ as the Son of God in a world that so brutally denies his claims? Or, as Williams puts it, proposing this as the theme of his book, “What is it that human beings owe to one another?” His subtitle— Language, Faith, and Fiction—is key to Williams’ understanding of Dostoevsky’s answer to the question.

As someone who has wrestled with the problem of Christian fellowship, my interest was pricked by the question. I instantly reformed it again from “What is it that human beings owe to one another?” to  “What is it that Catholics owe to one another?” What does it mean to coexist with each other in the belief in Christ as the Son of God in a society that turns its back on those claims? For me I see less a brutal denial as much as an even more brutal failure to engage that belief in any form at all. There is something more brutal than denying, it is simply ignoring the other or not speaking to them. This has always been the weapon of choice in my family – my two sisters and my brother no longer speak to me.

The representative passage that Neuhaus chooses to answer this from Williams’ book on Dostoevsky is this: “The enterprise of growth and so the life of narrative thus always involves a venturing into that uncontrolled territory where dialogue and interaction bring to light, not to say bring into being, hidden dimensions in a speaker. To engage in this venture is to accept at the outset that no speaker has the last word, and that the position taken up in an initial exchange is going to be tested and sifted and renegotiated in the process. It is to accept that at the outset no one possesses the simple truth about their identity or interest, and to treat with the deepest skepticism any appeal to the sacredness of an inner life that is transparent to the speaker.”

Neuhaus comments: “This passage shows an endlessly patient insistence on and respect for the “the other” and “otherness,” a dialogical enmity toward every form of closure, an obligation to keep the narrative open. It is in many ways an attractive disposition, although at times its expression, frequently littered with literary jargon, can be cloying. For instance: “In sum: Responsibility is the free acceptance of the call to give voice to the other, while leaving them time and space to be other; it is the love of the other in his or her wholeness, that is, including the fact of their relatedness to more than myself; it is the acceptance of the labor of decentering the self and dissolving its fantasies of purely individual autonomy, and it is to be open to a potentially unlimited range of relation, to human and nonhuman others.” That is certainly Rowan Williams. Whether it is Dostoevsky is quite another matter. My own impression is that Dostoevsky would gag at that way of putting the matter.”

Fr. Neuhaus always made me laugh out loud.

But he always returns to praise: “Williams also offers flashes of insight such as this: “The cultural situation evoked in Devils illuminates that teasingly familiar formula in Karamazov about everything being permitted if God does not exist. What happens ‘if God does not exist’ is not that a particular item is withdrawn from the sum total of actual things, so that no punishment for evil can be guaranteed. It is that we are no longer able to see violence against others as somehow blasphemous, an offense against an eternal order; no longer able to see our dealings with each other as opening on to a depth of interiority that we cannot fathom or exhaust. In a world deprived of such possibilities, it is reasonable enough to respond to a suicide by saying ‘it was the best solution’; there is nothing definably insane about taking one’s own life.” The great question posed by Dostoevsky in asking about what human beings owe to one another is how we can be counted on to respect that to which we are not obliged by a truth beyond our own contriving. That is the context in which the proposition is entertained that, if there is no God, all things are permitted.

Fr. Neuhaus concludes: “Rowan Williams persuasively makes the case that Dostoevsky’s novels are a “polyphonic” exercise in which the many voices of his characters, including the voices of his conflicted self, address with inspired passion, cool rationality, demonic possession, and radical faith the question of what we human beings owe one another. In making that case, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction is — despite the author’s excursions into strumming the jargon of fashionable literary theory — a magnificent contribution to understanding the questions that haunted and drove the world’s greatest novelist…Dostoevsky illuminates what we human beings owe one another. …it does provide needed wisdom in tempering the rancor of the bellicosity to which we human beings, including we Christians, are prone.”

It strikes me that the response of the secular society to the Catholics in their midst is to marginalize, to turn their backs on us. Many times arguing from the point of view of faith is seen to eliminate one from the discussion – the diabolists in our midst see an argument from faith as being “absolutist” and not worthy of reply. Oddly enough the so-called absolutist is discarding the many in favor of one whereas the relativist is only recognizing one to begin with and doesn’t engage in any beyond that. As Peter Kreeft put it in A Refutation Of Moral Relativism: “Relativism says there are no absolutes… Absolutism says there are some absolutes. At least one absolute. Absolutism is relatively absolutistic, and relativism is absolutely relativistic.”

Much in the same way as my family, to deny the other actually involves dealing with him, so the solution is to ignore the other. The diabolist’s solution is to ignore the Catholic – this is far safer, far easier to deal with. But it can never last. Most situations I have found simply require patience in dealing with the other – what was Flannery’s collection of short stories called? “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” an expression she found in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that stuck in her mind. This is what I took from Neuhaus’ meditation on Dostoyevsky’s Question: No speaker has the last word, and that the position taken up in an initial exchange is going to be tested and sifted and renegotiated in the process. It is to accept that at the outset no one possesses the simple truth about their identity or interest, and to treat with the deepest skepticism any appeal to the sacredness of an inner life that is transparent to the speaker. You cannot marginalize Jesus, it is only an illusion that one can, in the same way that the diabolist (relativist) claims that he advocates no absolutes. Everything moves towards a resolution. In the meantime, let us pray for one another as we approach that resolution.