Dostoevsky - Love in The Brothers Karamazov - A Philosophical Guide

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

So today we’re going to be talking about the book The Brothers Karamazov.

Which means among other things we’re going to be talking today about the faith of Dostoevsky.

Faith was a big part of how he lived his life. And if you listen to the people that have spent years studying his work, they often describe his view of faith as a kind of existential, tragic form of Christianity.

Now, to a modern person who just reads that it can sound on the surface like it’s an oxymoron.

Tragic Christianity? Existential questions? Isn’t Christianity the thing you believe in so you don’t have to be in agony with existential dread every day?

Someone could even say when it comes to how most people seem to be using this Christianity thing: Jesus was basically a fidget spinner that had 12 disciples following him around.

How can that ever be anything but something that helps people cope with a painful reality they can’t fully affirm?

The first thing we have to do if we want to understand where he’s coming from with his faith, is to make sure we’re not reducing Christianity, and all of religion for that matter, to just a superficial, lazy kind of religion that gives people easy answers.

There may be plenty of people out there you can find that use religion like this, but again, Dostoevsky, and many others, are not this kind of Christian.

In fact, if you remember the episode we just did before we started this series where we talked about Keiji Nishitani and his views on the value of a deeply religious quest, the truth is that there’s a similarity to the ways that Nishitani and Dostoevsky each viewed religion.

Dostoevsky thought that Russian Orthodox Christianity was not some sacred institution that people should blindly commit themselves to. More than anything, he saw an organized religious approach like this as something that gave people a language they could use to navigate the purpose they served in a larger network of being.

And when someone truly walks that kind of religious path, to him it just ends up being something very tragic and existential. It was an existence that at times was absolutely miserable for him, but then at other times it was deeply beautiful. It was a range of experience that he no