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. Best IAS Coaching In IndiaJune 15, 2021 at 6:28 PM

    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
37 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
34 comments
Read more

X the variable

X is the most versatile and hence a very precious entity in mathematics. Whenever there is an unknown quantity whose value has to be discovered, the mathematician begins with: Let the unknown quantity be x . This A2Z series presented a few personalities who played certain prominent roles in my life. They are not the only ones who touched my life, however. There are so many others, especially relatives, who left indelible marks on my psyche in many ways. I chose not to bring relatives into this series. Dealing with relatives is one of the most difficult jobs for me. I have failed in that task time and again. Miserably sometimes. When I think of relatives, O V Vijayan’s parable leaps to my mind. Father and little son are on a walk. “Be careful lest you fall,” father warns the boy. “What will happen if I fall?” The boy asks. The father’s answer is: “Relatives will laugh.” One of the harsh truths I have noticed as a teacher is that it is nearly impossible to teach your relatives – nephews
16 comments
Read more

Zorba’s Wisdom

Zorba is the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek . I fell in love with Zorba the very first time I read the novel. That must have been in my late 20s. I read the novel again after many years. And again a few years ago. I loved listening to Zorba play his santuri . I danced with him on the Cretan beaches. I loved the devil inside Zorba. I called that devil Tomichan. Zorba tells us the story of a monk who lived on Mount Athos. Father Lavrentio. This monk believed that a devil named Hodja resided in him making him do all wrong things. Hodja wants to eat meet on Good Friday, Hodja wants to sleep with a woman, Hodja wants to kill the Abbot… The monk put the blame for all his evil thoughts and deeds on Hodja. “I’ve a kind of devil inside me, too, boss, and I call him Zorba!” Zorba says. I met my devil in Zorba. And I learnt to call it Tomichan. I was as passionate as Zorba was. I enjoyed life exuberantly. As much as I was allowed to, at least. The plain truth is
19 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
10 comments
Read more