There’s an important little
passage in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov which has in it the seed of an
important argument. The great thing about this book, however, is that it is
possible to pick any number of little passages that say something profound and
important.
Alyosha, who has been
living in a monastery, has the following conversation with his brother Ivan who
tends towards atheism:
“I
understand it all too well, Ivan: to want to love with your insides, your
guts—you said it beautifully, and I’m terribly glad that you want so much to
live,” Alyosha exclaimed, “I think everyone should love life before everything
else in the world.”
“Love life more than
its meaning?”
“Certainly,
love it before logic, as you say, certainly before logic, and only then will I
also understand its meaning. That is how I’ve long imagined it. Half of your
work is done and acquired, Ivan: you love life. Now you only need to apply
yourself to the second half, and you are saved.” (pp. 230-231, Pevear
translation)
Alyosha is above all
trying to save his brother. Ivan through the course of the novel makes a subtle,
but penetrating attack on Christianity. For Ivan there is no God and no
immortality. Dostoevsky puts forward one of the most powerful attacks on
Christianity, but he also puts forward a very profound defence. In this little
passage and others there is put forward the essence of Christian
existentialism. It is from life and individual experience that it is possible
to become convinced of the truth and to obtain faith.
I watched a film
recently about the great scientist Stephen Hawking. It was called the Theory of
Everything. At one point Hawking at a press conference says something along the
lines of that he has explained everything in the universe. There was no need
for God, there was no room for God. By explaining everything he had as it were
left no room for God and, indeed, explained Him away. Everything that modern
physics puts forward is, no doubt, true or as true as anything can be
considering the present state of our knowledge. It is folly to question what
great minds have discovered about the universe. But if physics describes
everything and there is no room for God, it would appear that faith can no
longer be possible. Where is God if Mr Hawking can explain everything?
Mr Hawking journeys
outwards and his great mind travels outwards into the universe and backwards in
time to the beginning of time. But his journey is in the wrong direction if he
wants to find God. God is not in the journey outward. Rather God is found
within. This does not, of course, mean that God is in me, or that I am God.
That is nonsense and blasphemy, but the way to become acquainted with God is through
a different way of reflecting than that which journeys outwards to the
beginning of time.
What is it to love
life? It is to love each second of life. But what is the experience of life? It
is what I do on a day to day basis. This
morning I lay in bed and at some point I chose to get up. I could have lain
there a little longer. I chose to make some coffee, I could have chosen to make
tea. My basic fundamental experience of life and what I love about it is my
ability to choose. My basic experience just like my experience that grass is
green is that I have absolute freedom of will. Of course, I may be deceived in
my experience. But then again since Descartes we know that I may be deceived in
my experience of the external world. The route of scepticism ends in a cul-de-sac.
But my sense of freedom is as real to me as anything else in the world if not
more so. I would less readily doubt my freedom than anything else apart from my
existence. I am free, therefore I am.
But my freedom is such
that I am an uncaused cause. Every choice I make is uncaused apart from the
fact that I choose. There is nothing or there need be nothing that compels me
to choose to drink tea or coffee. I can do either. But Mr Hawking’s universe
has no uncaused cause, at least not after the Big Bang. Physics amounts to
billiard balls hitting against each other. Perhaps, they are complicated little
billiard balls that behave in complicated ways, but still this is all materialism,
for all there is, is matter. Every
action has a cause. A neuron hits against an electron, a quark flutters and I
choose to drink coffee.
Science would like to
explain my uncaused cause as biology. The brain is just a collection of atoms
and through a complex series of reactions I choose to drink coffee. But why
should I doubt the basic experience of choice for the sake of a theory about
atoms and sub atomic particles that I cannot see? Why should not my fundamental
feeling of freedom trump whatever science tries to do in order to explain that
my feeling of freedom is illusory? If science could prove to me that the world
I see was in fact an illusion, I would still believe in the world. Well, by the
same token I still believe in my freedom despite whatever science can attempt
to do that proves that I am really a complex automaton. I do not feel myself to
be an automaton. Nor do you.
The rest follows of
itself. My sense of freedom is my sense of something that is not controlled by
the laws of physics. Every step I make is its own little miracle. It is an
uncaused cause. It is this that makes me love life. If everything I did was
caused by instinct, by need, by atoms, I would hate life and would consider it
not worth living.
Alyosha is saying to
Ivan ‘reflect on your own individual experience, the fact that you love life.’
“Love it before logic.” There is a mystery at the heart of life and that
mystery is that we are free in a way that cannot be properly explained.
Here again is the key
to Christian existentialism. We must go beyond logic. When Wittgenstein wrote
his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he set out the logic in pages of brilliance
that staggered his examiners in Cambridge. They said they didn’t understand it,
but it was clearly a work of genius, so despite there being no footnotes, he
got his Ph.d. After the most brilliant logical demonstrations, however,
Wittgenstein concluded his work in the following way:
My
propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally
recognises them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them,
over them (He must so to speak throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on
it.)
He must surmount these
propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Whereof one cannot
speak thereof one must be silent. (6.54-7)
The ultimate truth of
the universe is beyond logic and beyond the ability of man to understand. It
can therefore only be expressed in literature in art and in music. It can,
however, be experienced and, indeed, is experienced by us every day in the
miracle of our freedom.
From my freedom I know
that I am not dependent on atoms and from this I know that I am something other
in my essence from rocks and trees. What I am is not something I am ever going
to understand for it is beyond the wit of man to explain. Mr Hawking is trying
to storm the gates of heaven with his reason and finding nothing there,
declares there is no heaven and no God. But his efforts are as vain as medieval
monks who tried to come up with ingenious logical proofs of the existence of
God. You cannot get there with logic, so don’t try.
If what I am is not
dependent on physics, then why should my existence not survive the death of
what I am physically. If truth ultimately is beyond logic, then why should not
a virgin give birth, why should not God be both God and man or God and not God?
Why indeed should not there be resurrection, death and not death.
We are not there yet.
Alyosha tells us that Ivan’s love of life is such that he is halfway there. He
still has to recognise that he has reached the top of the ladder and must then
throw it away. He has to leap. As Kierkegaard taught us, he has to embrace
contradiction.
Of course, once you
have done that, theology and philosophy are finished, for which reason
Wittgenstein recommended working on a farm. But what is left is the ability to
experience God from within, from the miracle of freedom and existence, and to
express this feeling in art. The greatest composer of all, I think, is Olivier
Messiaen because he spent his life trying to express what was beyond the ladder
and for brief moments as with, for example, his Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps he
succeeds. We glimpse it. Or at least we can if we choose to do so.
If you like my writing, you can find my books Scarlet on the
Horizon, An Indyref Romance and Lily of St Leonards on Amazon. Please follow
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