The Outsider (34 page)

And here is Ivan
’
s denunciation of the
‘
thought-riddled nature
’
:

‘
I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha. I know it is only a graveyard, but it
’
s a most precious graveyard. Precious are the dead that lie there; every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, such passionate faith in their work.
...
I shall steep my soul in my feeling. I love the leaves in spring, the blue sky—that
’
s all. It
’
s not a matter of intellect or logic— it
’
s loving with one
’
s inside, with one
’
s stomach.
’

‘
I think everyone should love life above everything else in the world,
’
Alyosha tells him.

‘
Love life regardless of the meaning of it?
’

‘
Certainly—it must be regardless of logic—
’
it
’
s only then one can understand its meaning.
’

We can see how far Dostoevsky has advanced beyond Lawrence
’
s horror of
’
lack of pattern and purpose in Nature
’
. Behind man lies the abyss, nothingness; the Outsider knows this; it is his business to sink claws of iron into life, to grasp it tighter than the indifferent bourgeois, to build, to Will, in spite of the abyss. Ivan has half-solved the Outsider
’
s major problem. Alyosha recognizes this; he tells him:

‘
Half your work is done. It only remains to do the other half now.
’

‘
What other half?
’

‘
To raise up your dead, who have perhaps not died after all.
’
²

Alyosha is right, but he does not understand the magnitude of the problem of
’
raising up the dead
’
. Ivan goes on to explain this. He also has the makings of a monk, for he tells Alyosha:

‘
I accept God and I accept his wisdom, his purpose, which are unknowable to us; I believe in the underlying order and meaning of life; I believe in the eternal harmony. ... I believe in the Word to which the Universe is striving. ... I seem to be on the right path, don
’
t I ? Yet— in the final result, I don
’
t accept God
’
s world.
’

Then begins the great discussion, or rather, the great monologue, for it is mostly spoken by Ivan. What Ivan now
explains in full is the difficulty of the
‘
second half of the solution. Cruelty and misery: that is Ivan
’
s theme. He confines himself to cases of cruelty to children, and mercilessly describes these for a dozen pages. He concludes with his well-known statement:
‘
It
’
s not God I don
’
t accept, Alyosha—only that I most respectfully return him the entrance ticket.
’

It is an Existentialist argument. To build on the abyss, you must have a foundation. For Ivan, the sufferings of one tortured child are enough to blast any foundation apart. Lawrence asserted that bodily sufferings have ultimately no power over the Will. That would be a good enough foundation to build on, to Will on. But what about the children
’
s sufferings ? A child cannot be expected to exert tremendous Will-power. The child
’
s sufferings just
are;
they cannot be reduced or resolved into a universal harmony, a System.

Not a rational solution, perhaps, Alyosha admits; but what of the irrational solution, the religious solution that Christ died as a pledge that the world
’
s suffering would be ultimately resolved? Ivan has an answer for that too; his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
³

Christ returned to earth once, Ivan tells Alyosha, in Seville, at the time of the Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor had him seized and cast into prison. The same evening he visited him, and explained why he could not allow him to resume his ministry in Seville. This, in summary, is what he tells Christ:
‘
What message did you preach in Palestine? That all men must strive for more abundant life, that they must Will unceasingly to realize that
“
The Kingdom of God is within them
”
, that they should not be content to be men, but should strive to be
“
Sons of God
”
? You raised the standard of conduct of the Old Testament; you added to the Ten Commandments. Then you left us to build a Church on your precepts. What you didn
’
t seem to realise is that all men are not prophets and moral geniuses. It is not the Church
’
s business to save only those few who are strong-willed enough to save themselves. We are concerned about raising the general standard of all the race, and we can
’
t do this by telling every man that he had better be his own Church—as you did. That is tantamount to telling every man that he must be an Outsider—which God forbid! The Outsider
’
s problems are insoluble, and we, the elect, know this. You raised the standard too high, and we have had
to haul it down again. We the elect, are unhappy—because we know just how terribly difficult it is to
“
achieve salvation
”
. But we have always kept this a secret from the people—who are not much better than dogs and cats, after all. Now you come back, proposing to give the show away! Do you suppose I can allow that ? I am afraid I shall have to have you quietly done away with and it is entirely your own fault. Prophets are all very well when they are dead, but while they are alive there is nothing for it b
ut to burn or crucify them...

As the Grand Inquisitor ends his indictment, Christ leans forward and kisses him on his pale lips. This is his reply: Your reasoning is powerful but my love is stronger.

But Ivan has stated the case against religion as it has never been stated, before or since. Christ
’
s love is no answer to that.

Dostoevsky
’
s avowed intention in writing
The Brothers Karamazov
was to analyse and refute atheism. There are many critics who believe that in this his artistry overcame his intention, and that he made Ivan
’
s case unanswerable. Let us agree at once that
‘
The Grand Inquisitor
’
is an artistic
tour de force,
and the statement of the opposite case (in the
‘
Russian Monk
’
section) cannot compare with it in power and conviction. But let us not confuse the dramatic effectiveness of an argument with its final truth. What Ivan has done is to express the ultimate No that drove Lawrence to mind-suicide, and Van Gogh, Nijinsky and Nietzsche insane. He has done this so brilliantly, so finally, that we must pay a great deal of attention to his argument, and get its full significance quite clear, before we go on to consider the
‘
refutation
’
of it. It is the most tremendous Outsider indictment ever written. The picture we have built up of the Outsider shows him as a halfway house to a higher type of man than the
‘
once-born
’
man; he loses more sleep, eats less, and suffers from all kinds of nervous diseases. Nevertheless, when we have analysed the Outsider
’
s uneasiness, his state of nervous tension, we have found it to have an
objective cause
in his sense of the precariousness of human life, as exemplified in the passage from Beddoes quoted on p. 108.

Now the once-born bourgeois might object that the precariousness
is there;
everybody knows it; it would be folly to live in a state of nervous tension on account of it. (He might instance the ancient Greeks, that nation of healthy, once-born
optimists whose art is full of the consciousness of death and its inevitability.) But this is to ignore the biological truth that the preservation of life depends on awareness of death. If you inoculate a man with a small quantity of a disease he becomes immune to a large quantity; if you subject a man to extremes of heat and cold, he develops a resistance to both and can survive under conditions that would kill another man. The Outsider can regard his exacerbated sense of life
’
s precarious-ness as a biological measure to increase his toughness; in fact, to make him capable of
‘
living more abundantly
’
. This is the conclusion that Stepp
e
nwolf reached.

Dostoevsky has considered the question from the angle of
freedom.
His beetle-man stated his credo,
‘
that man
’
s whole business is to prove that he is man, not a cog-wheel
’
. Freedom means life; it has no meaning in relation to a chest of drawers or a dead body. It has less meaning for a tree than for a man. In the same way, it has less meaning for an incurable dipsomaniac or drug-addict than for a normally healthy person. The more life, the more possibility of freedom.

Now we can begin to see the full meaning of Ivan
’
s arguments. His argument builds up carefully to the conclusion of James
’
s vastation:
‘
There is no freedom.
⁹
He agrees, there
is
life; he loves life,
‘
the sticky buds in spring
’
, but he cannot accept any meaning of life. It just
‘
is
’
—a senseless, devil-ridden chaos. In the section on cruelty to children, Ivan paints his Nietzschean picture of human nature: human, all too human, futile, deluded; the intelligence that makes him man only making him (as Mephistopheles says) more brutal than any beast. Now Ivan passes on to Christ; and here we are reminded of a speech by Kirilov, when he tells Netchaev:
⁴

‘
Listen to a great idea: there was a day on earth and in the middle of earth were three crosses. A man on one cross had such faith that he said to another:
“
Today you will be with me in paradise
”
. The day ended, both died, and neither found paradise nor resurrection.
...
Listen, that man was the greatest of all on earth.
...
The whole planet... is sheer madness without that man. And so if the laws of Nature didn
’
t spare even him ... if they made even him live among lies and die for a
lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and is based on a lie and a stupid mockery.
’

Ivan also believes that
^‘
that man was the greatest of all on earth
’
, and his
^‘
Grand Inquisitor
’
legend is an expansion of Kirilov
’
s speech. The Inquisitor is a man of spiritual insight; he has starved in the desert to achieve freedom; but, as Ivan says,
^‘
he saw it was no great moral blessedness to achieve perfection if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God
’
s creatures have been created as a mockery: that these poor rebels can never turn into giants!
’
The Inquisitor
’
s feeling about mankind is one of deep pity. Perhaps the Outsider can be aware of depths of human misery, but these poor insects, leading their blinded lives, who would open their eyes to their own bondage and wretchedness ? What good would it do, anyway? Give them bread and amusements; give them shallow little creeds to fight for and silly little superstitions to sing hymns about, but don
’
t ask wisdom of them. Christ asked: Which of you can drink of the cup that I drink of? Yet he behaved as if everyone could. He said:
^‘
My Yoke is easy and my burden light,
’
but this is a lie, for freedom is the greatest burden of all: to tell every man to think for himself, to solve the problem of good and evil and then act according to his solution: to live for truth and not for his country, or society, or his family. It is kinder to men to think of them as insects; eternal life for such creatures must be a monstrous superstition. There will always be those few who strive to realize the ideal of freedom by being their own judge; these will know the agony of standing alone. Tor only we, who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy,
’
the Inquisitor tells Christ. This is the conclusion of the Treatise on the Steppe nwolf. The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is the agent that ensures happiness for millions of
‘
Insiders
’
. Haller
’
s reaction to this truth, we remember, was the decision to cut his throat. Alyosha asks Ivan:
‘
How can you live, with such a hell in your heart and head?
’
And Ivan answers: There is a strength to endure everything.
’
This is Ivan
’
s case, case for Ultimate No. What of the other side?

The Recollections of Father Zossima
’
are Dostoevsky
’
s reply to the
‘
Legend of the Grand Inquisitor
’
. Zossima is the Abbot of the Monastery where Alyosha makes a record of his last conversations; these form an autobiography, with appended
‘
moral exhortations
’
. Zossima begins by speaking of his elder
brother, who died of consumption when Zossima was a child. This brother was an intelligent youth, a free-thinker, who declared that Lenten facts were twaddle, and there was no God. But when the disease confined him to bed, a change came over him; suddenly he became tolerant of his mother
’
s devotions; a curious mystical frame of mind possessed him (which the doctors attributed to the disease).
‘
Life is a paradise; we are all in paradise but we won
’
t see it.
⁵
When the doctor told him he might have many days yet to live, or months and years, he answered,
‘
Why reckon days? One day is enough for a man to know all happiness.
’
⁵

This made a deep impression on his young brother
’
s mind. Connected with this was an occasion when he heard the Book of Job read in Church:
‘
Naked I came out of my mother
’
s womb and naked shall I return to the earth
...
’
and Tor the first time I understood something read in the Church of God
’
. It is the mystical sentiment of Blake
’
s
‘
Go, love without the help of anything on earth
’
; the experience laid the foundation for Zossima
’
s later religious fervour,
Zossima
’
s story of his youth seems to follow the pattern of other Outsiders
’
(Emil Sinclair and Tolstoy in particular): he forgets the childish impressions when he becomes a cadet in the army; he
‘
sins
’
, and riots, does his best to behave like a
^‘
young blood
’
. The turning-point comes when he has challenged someone to a duel; suddenly the realization of his folly bursts on him; he allows his opponent to fire at him, and then throws away his pistol, and preaches a sermon:
‘
Nature is sinless
...
only we are sinful; we don
’
t understand that life is paradise, for we have only to understand it and all will be fulfilled in all
its beauty.
...
’