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Feb. 5th, 2005 03:53 amDostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor chapter was assigned for a class I'm in, to illustrate the problem of evil, the argument that evil disproves a God worth the name, the counterargument that free will necessitates evil, the countercounterargument that free will is worthless next to safety and certainty. I'm not sure I agree that this was the best text for it, it falls apart into paradox at several ends as Dostoevsky had the unique novelistic virtue of seldom agreeing with himself. But maybe it was the perfect text for this reason, casting students adrift in the chaos of wish and debate, feeling the importance of resolution but clueless as to how to resolve. I'm not sure the second text chosen, Billy Budd, is a logical next step. At any rate it's not great Melville, though any Melville is great (caught some Dostoevskyitis).
Anyway as the atheism loophole gets me out of the problem of the problem of evil, I find myself meditating in class on how many of the great 19th century writers tackled God, Jesus and The Devil as characters or rewritable forces. Especially interesting is that all five of the great public novelists of the latter half drag Jesus to their party. I think of Bloom's expression, "pulling oneself up by one's own root" and the real audacity of these projectmakers, raiding every source of power in their attempt to remake the world in and through books.
George Eliot just translated Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, as well as some tonic Spinoza. These were her only book-length works until she turned to fiction in her late thirties, though, so they weren't exactly side projects or work for hire. Starting out in a hothouse Christian environment it was necessary to get the refutation exactly right, not just to free herself but to retain the power of her earlier convictions in that freedom. You have to deny God in favor of something better or your eye stays on the backdoor, a la Wordsworth, Hemingway etc. etc. etc. And it takes some sharp searching to find what's better than God.
In Brothers Karamazov Jesus shows up in the Grand Inquisitor chapter, and the Devil has one to himself toward the end.
Dickens retells the Gospel stories at length in a book for children.
Tolstoy does the same in his Gospel redaction, and is a less subtle influence on his neo-Tolstoyan Jesus.
Victor Hugo doesn't use them as characters in his novels, as far as I know, but wrote hundreds of pages of narrative poetry about the rehabilitation of Satan, Jesus' life, the many faces of God.
These four guys exemplify pretty well the main deathtrends of Christianity: crazy faith, vague faith, self-denying secularization, and spirituality.
Of course the Romantics took their shots at the gods a generation or two earlier. Goethe's Satan inspired Byron's, who shows up in the plays Cain and The Deformed Transformed. Jesus is a character as well as a human state in Blake, as are several good and bad versions of God. Shelley's Jupiter and Cenci are both Jehovah and Devil, and his Prometheus can be taken as a revised Christ. I think Keats' god poems are mostly about art (though so is religion). The Devil is never far off in Hawthorne's tales, but I think the camera only catches him in Goodman Brown. Though I think the most diablified character in literature must be the exploding lawyer in Bleak House.
And before them Swedenborg, Milton, Dante et al. all grabbed the reins of the religions of their fathers. It all seems more drastic in the post-Enlightenment though. For an artist, God has to be a given, a corpse, or a puppet. You're either a child playing at His forgiving feet or his supplanter. By artist I mean organizer of the worlds of the world.
Anyway as the atheism loophole gets me out of the problem of the problem of evil, I find myself meditating in class on how many of the great 19th century writers tackled God, Jesus and The Devil as characters or rewritable forces. Especially interesting is that all five of the great public novelists of the latter half drag Jesus to their party. I think of Bloom's expression, "pulling oneself up by one's own root" and the real audacity of these projectmakers, raiding every source of power in their attempt to remake the world in and through books.
George Eliot just translated Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, as well as some tonic Spinoza. These were her only book-length works until she turned to fiction in her late thirties, though, so they weren't exactly side projects or work for hire. Starting out in a hothouse Christian environment it was necessary to get the refutation exactly right, not just to free herself but to retain the power of her earlier convictions in that freedom. You have to deny God in favor of something better or your eye stays on the backdoor, a la Wordsworth, Hemingway etc. etc. etc. And it takes some sharp searching to find what's better than God.
In Brothers Karamazov Jesus shows up in the Grand Inquisitor chapter, and the Devil has one to himself toward the end.
Dickens retells the Gospel stories at length in a book for children.
Tolstoy does the same in his Gospel redaction, and is a less subtle influence on his neo-Tolstoyan Jesus.
Victor Hugo doesn't use them as characters in his novels, as far as I know, but wrote hundreds of pages of narrative poetry about the rehabilitation of Satan, Jesus' life, the many faces of God.
These four guys exemplify pretty well the main deathtrends of Christianity: crazy faith, vague faith, self-denying secularization, and spirituality.
Of course the Romantics took their shots at the gods a generation or two earlier. Goethe's Satan inspired Byron's, who shows up in the plays Cain and The Deformed Transformed. Jesus is a character as well as a human state in Blake, as are several good and bad versions of God. Shelley's Jupiter and Cenci are both Jehovah and Devil, and his Prometheus can be taken as a revised Christ. I think Keats' god poems are mostly about art (though so is religion). The Devil is never far off in Hawthorne's tales, but I think the camera only catches him in Goodman Brown. Though I think the most diablified character in literature must be the exploding lawyer in Bleak House.
And before them Swedenborg, Milton, Dante et al. all grabbed the reins of the religions of their fathers. It all seems more drastic in the post-Enlightenment though. For an artist, God has to be a given, a corpse, or a puppet. You're either a child playing at His forgiving feet or his supplanter. By artist I mean organizer of the worlds of the world.
