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Joseph Frank gives us another delicious morsel of Christian trivia. He is discussing “The Brothers Karamazov” and Dostoevsky’s monumental fable “The Grand Inquisitor” in particular. The fable is told through the character Ivan:
Of course, the atheistic materialist can wonder how anyone can even begin to consider such issues in any serious light, but whatever may be said about my own want of faith in the supernatural, I can appreciate how one can have even less faith in this world as we know it and in our fellow man as well as in oneself, though one would like that other transcendent world to be better than the one we know, not worse.
As a preface, the erudite Ivan indulges in a brief survey of the universal popularity of similar poems and plays in the past, when “it was customary… to bring down heavenly powers on earth.” Most important of all was a Byzantine apocryphal tale, “The Wanderings of Our Lady in Hell,” which depicts the Mother of God being led through hell by the archangel Michael. Horrified by the suffering of the damned, she falls before God “and begs for mercy for all in Hell… indiscriminately.” God points to the crucified Christ and asks how “his tormentors” can be forgiven, but he relents when Our Lady summons “all the saints, all the martyrs, all the angels and archangels” to join her in pleading for mercy. When God finally agrees to “a respite of suffering” for those in hell every year from Good Friday until Trinity Day (eight weeks after Easter), the sinners chant, “Thou art just, O lord, in this judgment.”It goes to show that it has long been a difficult, even torturous, issue for Christians, that tension between belief in an all compassionate and loving God and the belief in eternal damnation in a lake of fire. This discussion has also had some renewed life in today’s media, as may be seen in the Rob Bell controversy, and then there are my own ruminations.
Of course, the atheistic materialist can wonder how anyone can even begin to consider such issues in any serious light, but whatever may be said about my own want of faith in the supernatural, I can appreciate how one can have even less faith in this world as we know it and in our fellow man as well as in oneself, though one would like that other transcendent world to be better than the one we know, not worse.
