Skip to main content

Ivan’s Agony



Ivan Karamazov of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Karamazov Brothers, is a highly tortured character because he cannot accept the given reality.  “I don’t accept this world of God’s,” he tells his brother Alyosha who is a highly spiritual person.  “It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t accept and cannot accept.”

How can an omniscient and omnipotent God create a world with so much evil?  Ivan’s intellect cannot find a satisfactory answer to that problem.  Ivan wants a world of goodness.  If human beings make use of their rational faculty properly, the world can be a place of goodness.  Ivan is an intellectual who would love to see a coldly moral world, a world in which people’s actions are based on reason. 

Ivan’s father himself is a wicked man who lives by his passions.  His step-brother, Smerdyakov, becomes a murderer because of Ivan’s cold philosophy.  Ivan is shocked beyond endurance by the murder of his own father by his own step-brother.  He becomes frenzied by the realisation of what his philosophy can do to someone like Smerdyakov who is not an intellectual, who cannot think like Ivan simply because he is incapable of doing so. 

Most people are incapable of thinking rationally.  The Aristotelian definition of man as a rational being is simply wrong.  Ivan’s basic premise is wrong: man is not rational.  Man is a passionate creature, driven by the dark forces that lie deep down in his soul. 

If Ivan could accept those dark forces in man, he would not have needed the God foisted on him by his religion.  He would have been able to discover an acceptable meaning in life. Ivan remained an extremely tortured soul simply because of his failure to accept the dark side of human nature.

Evil is more potent in the human world.  There is no escape from it.  No God can save man from that truth.  God may be able to save man from evil, however.  That depends on each individual, how he or she wants God to act on him or her.  Personally, I have been unable to accept God, even like Ivan.  But unlike Ivan I accept evil as inevitable.  It hits me hard everyday.  I accept the hits. I try my best to retain my sanity in this evil, evil world.


Comments

  1. This article will outline all the different strategies you should be aware of when it comes to soccer.

    Best IAS Coaching in India

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Our gods must have died laughing

A friend forwarded a video clip this morning. It is an extract from a speech that celebrated Malayalam movie actor Sreenivasan delivered years ago. In the year 1984, Sreenivasan decided to marry the woman he was in love with. But his career in movies had just started and so he hadn’t made much money. Knowing his financial condition, another actor, Innocent, gave him Rs 400. Innocent wasn’t doing well either in the profession. “Alice’s bangle,” Innocent said. He had pawned or sold his wife’s bangle to get that amount for his friend. Then Sreenivasan went to Mammootty, who eventually became Malayalam’s superstar, to request for help. Mammootty gave him Rs 2000. Citing the goodness of the two men, Sreenivasan said that the wedding necklace ( mangalsutra ) he put ceremoniously around the neck of his Hindu wife was funded by a Christian (Innocent) and a Muslim (Mammootty). “What does religion matter?” Sreenivasan asks in the video. “You either refuse to believe in any or believe in a...