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Of Morality and Immortality
Riddle me this: whether morality and justice require that life be immortal?
I remember when I first read “Crime and Punishment,” my first real taste of Dostoevsky, when I was but a wee undergraduate, oh, my achy-breaky heart!
I was actually put off by the ending. I had no idea that Dostoevsky was such a Christian writer. I was not even a hardcore materialist yet, and earnestly considered the God question to be even more open than I do now after my recent, serious flirtation with Christian philosophy, but my first reaction to the ending in “Crime and Punishment,” in which the protagonist finds God while serving hard time in the frozen wasteland of Siberia, was to find it a rather cheap ending, making the novel religious instead of realistic.
However, deep into middle-age, my emotional life is no longer so hard and unyielding to divine notions. When it comes to understanding how the world works, I am safely back in the materialist camp, but my heart is vulnerably open to the dreamy idea of a world and a life beyond this hard, earthly realm, seeing how the life I know is a barren wasteland in its own right. Today, I actually love Dostoevsky because he is a Christian writer. It’s a kind of romantic vision, this Christianity of mine.
_ _ _
The influence of Karamzin’s “Letters” on Dostoevsky was profound. Early in the book, Karamzin drops in to pay a call on Kant, the sage of Konigsberg, who expounds for his young Russian visitor’s benefit the two main ideas of the “Critique of Practical Reason” (published just the year before). Kant explained that the consciousness of good and evil is innate to mankind, written indelibly into the human heart. Earthly life, however, reveals a glaring contradiction: the virtuous in this world, those who choose to live by the good and obey the moral law, are not always the ones who prosper and receive their just reward. But if, as we must assume, the Eternal Creative Mind is rational and beneficent, then we must also assume that this contradiction will not be left unresolved. Hence we postulate the existence of an immortal life after physical death in which the good receive their reward, even though this postulate can never be proven by human reason. “Here,” Karamzin reports Kant as saying, “reason extinguishes her lamp and we are left in darkness. Only fancy can wander in this darkness and create fictions.” Dostoevsky thus first came across these two ideas, both defying a strictly rational explanation - that moral consciousness (conscience) is an ineradicable part of human nature, and that immortality is a necessary condition of any world order claiming to make moral sense - when he read Karamzin as a boy. What he acquired subsequently only built on this foundation.
…
Not to believe in God and immortality, for the later Dostoevsky, is to be condemned to live in an ultimately senseless universe, and the characters in his great novels who reach this level of self-awareness inevitably destroy themselves because, refusing to endure the torment of living without hope, they have become monsters in their misery.
-- Joseph Frank, “Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time”
_ _ _
I suppose that the existentialist philosophy of today is more comfortable with the idea of virtuous people not enjoying worldly favor. We accept that life is not fair, and we therefore more highly esteem goodness and selfless love wherever we find it. The individual of integrity is moral not because he expects to attain some reward either here or beyond the gossamer clouds, but because morality and love is an end in itself. Love is love.
On the other hand, the golden aureole of a sublime mythos doesn’t necessarily hurt. Indeed, even for those of us who are not especially virtuous in the first place, perhaps especially for us, a little hope can go a long way. One just wants to be happy, and if one cannot be happy in this world, then one might find some solace in the hope of being happy in some other life, some other time, some otherwhere.
I remember when I first read “Crime and Punishment,” my first real taste of Dostoevsky, when I was but a wee undergraduate, oh, my achy-breaky heart!
I was actually put off by the ending. I had no idea that Dostoevsky was such a Christian writer. I was not even a hardcore materialist yet, and earnestly considered the God question to be even more open than I do now after my recent, serious flirtation with Christian philosophy, but my first reaction to the ending in “Crime and Punishment,” in which the protagonist finds God while serving hard time in the frozen wasteland of Siberia, was to find it a rather cheap ending, making the novel religious instead of realistic.
However, deep into middle-age, my emotional life is no longer so hard and unyielding to divine notions. When it comes to understanding how the world works, I am safely back in the materialist camp, but my heart is vulnerably open to the dreamy idea of a world and a life beyond this hard, earthly realm, seeing how the life I know is a barren wasteland in its own right. Today, I actually love Dostoevsky because he is a Christian writer. It’s a kind of romantic vision, this Christianity of mine.
_ _ _
The influence of Karamzin’s “Letters” on Dostoevsky was profound. Early in the book, Karamzin drops in to pay a call on Kant, the sage of Konigsberg, who expounds for his young Russian visitor’s benefit the two main ideas of the “Critique of Practical Reason” (published just the year before). Kant explained that the consciousness of good and evil is innate to mankind, written indelibly into the human heart. Earthly life, however, reveals a glaring contradiction: the virtuous in this world, those who choose to live by the good and obey the moral law, are not always the ones who prosper and receive their just reward. But if, as we must assume, the Eternal Creative Mind is rational and beneficent, then we must also assume that this contradiction will not be left unresolved. Hence we postulate the existence of an immortal life after physical death in which the good receive their reward, even though this postulate can never be proven by human reason. “Here,” Karamzin reports Kant as saying, “reason extinguishes her lamp and we are left in darkness. Only fancy can wander in this darkness and create fictions.” Dostoevsky thus first came across these two ideas, both defying a strictly rational explanation - that moral consciousness (conscience) is an ineradicable part of human nature, and that immortality is a necessary condition of any world order claiming to make moral sense - when he read Karamzin as a boy. What he acquired subsequently only built on this foundation.
…
Not to believe in God and immortality, for the later Dostoevsky, is to be condemned to live in an ultimately senseless universe, and the characters in his great novels who reach this level of self-awareness inevitably destroy themselves because, refusing to endure the torment of living without hope, they have become monsters in their misery.
-- Joseph Frank, “Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time”
_ _ _
I suppose that the existentialist philosophy of today is more comfortable with the idea of virtuous people not enjoying worldly favor. We accept that life is not fair, and we therefore more highly esteem goodness and selfless love wherever we find it. The individual of integrity is moral not because he expects to attain some reward either here or beyond the gossamer clouds, but because morality and love is an end in itself. Love is love.
On the other hand, the golden aureole of a sublime mythos doesn’t necessarily hurt. Indeed, even for those of us who are not especially virtuous in the first place, perhaps especially for us, a little hope can go a long way. One just wants to be happy, and if one cannot be happy in this world, then one might find some solace in the hope of being happy in some other life, some other time, some otherwhere.