04/12/2025
« Mes pères moines, pourquoi vous faites maigre ? Pourquoi vous attendez que ça vous vaille des grâces dans les cieux ? Moi, pour une grâce comme ça, moi aussi, tiens, je vais faire maigre ! Non, mon saint moine, sois vertueux dans la vie, un peu, sois utile à la société, au lieu de t'enfermer dans ton monastère sur du pain tout cuit, et sans attendre qu'on te récompense là-haut - là, j'aimerais bien t'y voir. »
02/12/2025
"J'aime, il me disait, l'humanité, et je m'étonne moi-même : plus j'aime l'humanité en général, moins j'aime les gens en particulier, c'est-à-dire individuellement, en tant que personnes distinctes. Dans mes rêves, souvent, il me disait, j'en arrivais à des élans passionnés pour servir l'humanité, et, peut-être bien, réellement, je me serais fait crucifier pour les hommes, si, brusquement, d'une façon ou d'une autre, il avait fallu le faire, et, malgré cela, je ne suis pas capable de partager ma chambre avec quelqu'un deux jours de suite, ce que je sais d'expérience. Sitôt qu'il se rapproche de moi, tout de suite, sa personnalité opprime mon amour-propre et restraint ma liberté."
I was really stunned by this passage because it circles around a lot of things I've been thinking about recently, putting into words ideas that have been on my mind, without me being sure whether or not those ideas were my opinions (if that makes sense :p). Firstly, in some way or another, I'm always thinking about religion. I do not exactly know why, but thinking about religion has been a constant in my life for years. I wasn't brought up particularly religiously, but thinking about the meaning of things and realising that I was undoubtedly agnostic in principle and very atheist in practice was a pivotal moment in my life. Ever since, I've noticed the influence of monotheistic religious moral values everywhere and constantly wonder to what extent my own moral values, unknowingly, are shaped by them. This passage in the Brothers Karamazov occurs in a church, where an influential priest tries to quell the doubts of a woman with regard to her faith. He tells her that the best way for her to experience faith is to indiscriminately love humans and have her actions be guided by that devotion to love. In response to that, she claims that she already does love humanity, but perceives her love as being conditional as she always expects gratitude for her good deeds. The priest replies by telling the story of a doctor he met, which is what I included in my quotation.
I recently found myself in a position that I seldom find myself in -especially considering that my daily life centres around scientific academia- in which I felt like I had to fervently defend my atheism. Earlier this year, I ran into an old friend and we reconnected. It quickly became evident that said friend seemed to be developing feelings of a romantic nature for me, the idea of which wasn't displeasing to me at first approach. However, after just a month and a half of conversing regularly with this person (nothing more than conversation!), they revealed two very weighty pieces of news to me: 1) that they were supposedly very in love with me (I wish I were exaggerating, the word 'obsession' was used), and that they were extremely religious. It quickly became evident to me that they were hopeful -and somehow had been encouraged to think- that I would convert to their faith in order to be with them (which in my case, is completely out of the question). At that point, I had already become aware that whatever feelings existed between me and this person couldn’t go on. Being so ‘devoutly’ (:p) atheist, I perceived that a relationship with a religious person would be logistically and practically infeasible for me. I also just find piety very unattractive, as well as a bit silly. However, I am never one to turn down an interesting conversation, so I agreed to have a chat with them about faith and our thoughts on life. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to realise that of course they saw my lack of faith and religiosity not as the result of careful consideration and years of pondering on the topic, but as misunderstanding with respect to their own faith, and confusion and misguidance with respect to the world. That, according to them, if I found out more about their faith, and thought about it a little harder, I would see that in fact my own moral values (which they were certain aligned with theirs!) were undoubtedly compatible with their faith, along which they might grow to become even more virtuous.
I found myself between a rock and a hard place: even though I didn’t care about being judged, I felt like I needed to act as a representative for atheism, which I didn't want to be misunderstood. I wanted to claim -and this is the tie to Dostoyevksi’s paragraph- that though I consider myself to be thoroughly a realist in the most proper sense, it doesn’t mean that I don’t experience what I could only call devotion; devotion to life, to the universe, to science, to humanity, to art. I regularly feel an almost spiritual exaltation when I consider matters of the world (especially when thinking about science!), I am inspired to act in a way that I consider to be morally just, and, yet, I do not consider morality to be absolute and I fervently oppose the mere concept which underlies all religion, faith. On the other hand, I instead wanted to insist on the fact that nothing could create a bigger gap between my friend and me than religion, which in my opinion points to a fundamental divergence in our understanding of the world. I did not want them to try to convince themself that we had anything in common, lest they try to use that idea against me and my sense of freedom. Perhaps despite myself, I firmly believe that even if our moral values coincide, if you genuinely have faith and practice it according to some religion, I do not have anything in common with you.
One could see the doctor's confession as a flaw exclusive to the religious. But, uncomfortably, I recognised something of it in myself, first. Yes, my friend was, perhaps innocently so, condescending towards my views. And no, I do not want to reconsider my position on religion. But did I not recoil at his profession of faith? I accuse the faithful of being self-righteous, but do I not fall victim to the same pride? Perhaps that is what the doctor meant. Once you have spent any amount of time pondering the deeper questions of life, and convincing yourself that your views are, indeed, the best, it becomes difficult not to see the imperfections embodied by the individual. The more I aspire to a moral ideal, the more flaws I find in human behaviour. It is not a negligible effort not to forget that I have the moral high ground only in my personal frame of reference.
26/11/2025
Maybe I should turn this review space into a reading log and try to give more frequent updates along the way? I'm on page 65 and so far this has been quite easily readable. Our narrator has introduced us to the three brothers, and has so far gone into the most detail about Aliocha, the "sincere, pious and naive" one. He reminds me a lot of the protagonist in the Idiot, and now I'm curious to know which of the novels Dostoyevski wrote first :)
On another note, I tend to read the most during my commutes and breaks during our lectures, so I carry my books around in public quite a lot. I usually don't get much attention for reading a book, but I've only been reading the Brothers Karamazov for two days and two of my professors already struck up a conversation about it with me. Both had a similar reaction, they seemed simultaneously impressed with my choice of reading and afraid of what it should mean that I should want to subject myself to a 1000+ page Dostoyevski :p What is interesting though is that they both seemed to have an idea of Dostoyevski's writing, that I know is in fact unanimously shared by all readers, which is that his writing is somehow dark, existential, heavy... I've read Crime and Punishment and the Idiot, and while I would agree that the former goes into some psychologically darker territory, I remember the Idiot as being quite... "bright"? I really don't remember much of the story, but I remember that he describes human nature so precisely, so sensitively, that what is in fact an enormous work of insight comes off as easy and, ultimately, a delight to read. And so far I'm getting the same feeling from the Brothers Karamazov. It's slow, it's ponderous, but in every paragraph there is a touch of humour and this sense that the narrator feels a fond amusement with regard to humans.
25/11/2025
First day reading this. My last Dostoyevski was the Idiot, I believe, which I read in 2021. I forgot how absolutely exquisitely he describes human nature :)