The Chains of Faith, The Strongest of Reason
During
his lifetime my hero is sometimes an atheist, sometimes a believer; now a
fanatic, now a dissenter, and then once more an atheist… — to explain the inner
world of his self-created protagonist Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote these
words.
In a letter to Maykov from St. Petersburg in 1870, Dostoevsky revealed that the religious character of his forthcoming novel The Brothers Karamazov would be just such a figure. At different moments in life this hero would behave as a non-believer, then as a believer, then as a sectarian, and then like one possessed by religious frenzy. He himself would never truly grasp whether he was atheist or theist, devout or godless.
Dostoevsky began writing The Brothers Karamazov in 1878. He completed it three months before his death, in October 1880. For the ten years before this, he had been studying atheism and belief with obsessive devotion. His second wife Anna wrote that he had devoured an entire library on the subject — every book concerning God and faith.
The Dostoevsky who in youth had been a nihilist, the Dostoevsky who in early middle-age began to believe in God and even imagined that Christ’s second coming would be in Russia — in his later years found his whole existence torn by the violent duel between belief and disbelief. He wrote: no subject had occupied him more than “Does God exist, or does He not?” His genius, his life’s experience, his wisdom, his study — none gave him an answer. And at the end he confessed: like his hero, he too did not know whether God exists.
On this eternal conflict of atheism and faith stands his epic novel The Brothers Karamazov — that supreme work which many call the greatest novel of world literature. Yet even here the riddle of God remains unresolved. Across time writers, poets, thinkers have read it and declared opposing verdicts. Some said Dostoevsky was utterly atheist; others, reading the same lines, swore he was deeply devout.
Perhaps it is so that all notions of God are so inscrutable, so wrapped in mystery, that one’s belief itself shapes whether one is atheist or theist. In this world of six billion, believers still far outnumber non-believers — because religion is stamped on man by birth. No one consciously chooses his religion with a rational mind. Religion is imposed upon him in childhood. The scriptures shape the future consciousness of man. Ideas of good and evil, sin and virtue, justice and injustice, greed and contentment, hate and love, envy and affection — these pairs of human instincts are all defined within the machinery of religion. Religion is thus like a dark chamber of spells: what is taught within becomes the law that molds human impulses.
Yet there are men who take the hammer of reason and shatter these chains of faith. They leap in one stride from theism into atheism. But in doing so they fail to glimpse the vast ocean of humanity, of history, of the heart’s depths. The negligence of knowledge that dwells in atheism is born of the same blind mechanism that produces the devout believer. The pain of the atheist is more severe than the faith of the theist, for the atheist must explain every cause and effect through reason. And in that labor he encounters voids, riddles, and whirlpools into which he must plunge headlong with no salvation. The theist has his consolation: he may cloak the world in epic grandeur or defer all mysteries to the afterlife. But the atheist must wrestle with existence armed only with this body, with physics and biology — no other reasoning is permitted to him.
Atheists themselves fall into two tribes. For man is such a creature that he cannot live without sectarianism. The first tribe is of the extreme kind — almost nihilists, anarchists. Every step of human life they see as shackled by rules. To greet another with folded hands seems to them another ritual of faith. Such atheists are kin to religious fanatics. For the intoxication of sectarianism lies equally in the seed of blind atheism.
Diogenes the Cynic was such an extremist, a primitive naturalist. He lived in a clay jar, practiced masturbation in public, scorned every boundary of civic life — incest taboos, the prohibition of human flesh, marriage, class divisions, conventional religion. To Alexander the Great he said: “Stand out of my sunlight.” Diogenes was a forefather of nihilism. Plato called him a mad atheist, a destroyer. He urged the public to stay away from such life-denying philosophy.
The second tribe are not extremists. They become atheists by reasoning through history, humanity, philosophy. And often the same reasoning later returns them to faith. They wander perpetually in the subtle dialectic between belief and unbelief — sometimes prey to faith, sometimes to doubt.
In 1955, a year before his death, Einstein wrote a letter to the German-Jewish philosopher Eric Gutkind in response to his book Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The world read this letter as Einstein’s candid statement on religion. In it he wrote: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses. The Bible, though venerable, is but a collection of primitive legends.”
Shall we call this Einstein’s outright attack on faith? Perhaps not. For what is striking is that Einstein here does not speak of God as a cosmic designer at all. Rather, he voices his lifelong disbelief in a personal God who intervenes in human lives. In 1929 when Rabbi Herbert Goldstein asked him by telegram, “Do you believe in God?” Einstein replied by drawing a distinction: between confronting the vast, intricate, harmonious face of Nature and believing in a human deity who punishes evil and rewards good. He praised the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, saying: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of men.”
In his letter to Gutkind he again invoked Spinoza, criticizing the Jewish claim to special chosenness through monotheism. He wrote that he was pained by the “walls of pride” erected to defend such privileges — as a man outwardly, as a Jew inwardly. He argued: to demand special status through monotheism is no true causality at all. Einstein insisted that while he felt deeply at one with the Jewish spirit, he felt the same oneness with the spirit of all mankind.
Thus, in this letter Einstein perhaps expressed the most meaningful idea: that any God bound up with man’s self-serving ambition, with personal privilege, has no place. He supported only that sense of the divine which purifies man’s existence, emphasizing its purely human element, dedicated to ennobling and refining life.
The duel between Science and God must, in the end, yield victory to Humanity — for it is Humanity that gave birth to both. The logic of science and the logic of faith are both born of the human mind. The atom bomb of science and the fundamentalism of religion are both monuments of man’s darkness. Neither is for the improvement of human existence.
Those who think that atheism alone destroys reason are mistaken. Theism too, like atheism, is not mere emotion. It can be an act of reason, embraced by the thoughtful. The theism of Vivekananda, of Tagore, of Tolstoy, of Gandhi — this was a theism weighed in wisdom and knowledge. Even the educated Karamazov, atheist though he was, succumbed to such theism — before which even Tagore bowed his head: the humbling of human pride.
“Bow my head, O Lord,
Beneath the dust of Thy feet.”
When Tolstoy ended Anna Karenina with the hope that God might forgive unfortunate Anna, he meant that God who is the God of humanity. Gandhi’s God was Ram, and his ideal nation was Ramrajya. To tie this Ram to sectarian hatred is the act of fanatics. Gandhi’s God was his country, his ideal, his people — mirrored in the imagined form of Ram. In his Ram lives the archetypal hero of moral history, not the ritual deity of folk religion. The Ram who worshipped Truth was the Ram whom Gandhi served.
A truly religious person can never be a fundamentalist. The religious man is he who sees his own ideal as his religion. To be religious does not mean to be theist. One can be a religious atheist. Conversely, one can be an irreligious theist or atheist alike. Dostoevsky’s terms — “fanatic” or “dissenter” — describe these types. If they are theists, they riot in the name of religion; if atheists, they impose tyranny in the name of socialism. Bertrand Russell once observed that Catholic discipline and Communist discipline were two faces of the same coin. In Catholicism the authority of the Church is law, to question it is blasphemy. In Communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat is supreme; the Politburo cannot be questioned, and dissenters are branded enemies of the class. In both cases, to sustain the chains of faith they summon the strongest deity of reason. For the Church, reason dictates that sins of this life may be washed in the next. For the Communists, reason dictates that a man should live by eating twice a day and fighting the bourgeoisie.
Yet the greatest power of this strongest of reason lies in its iron armor. That armor is near-impossible to pierce. And within that armor, the heart is hollow — filled with illusory utopias. Whoever does not believe in the Catholic Church has no place within it. Likewise, whoever does not believe in Communism or Fascism has no place in the Communist or Fascist state. Just as religious institutions persecute non-believers, so too did Hitler, Ceausescu, Stalin annihilate their opponents.
On the other hand, Vivekananda, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Dostoevsky — they built another religion altogether, a religion of humanity. A religion that imposes no yoke upon man, that is not stamped upon his neck at birth, that does not annihilate unbelievers whether theist or atheist. This religion builds no walls of reason, summons no tougher. It has no chains, no rigid discipline. Within it one may be believer or doubter, rationalist or man of feeling — but above all, one is a worshipper of humanity.
And in this religion, the chains of faith and the strongest of reason are both rejected. What alone is acceptable is humanity itself.
In a letter to Maykov from St. Petersburg in 1870, Dostoevsky revealed that the religious character of his forthcoming novel The Brothers Karamazov would be just such a figure. At different moments in life this hero would behave as a non-believer, then as a believer, then as a sectarian, and then like one possessed by religious frenzy. He himself would never truly grasp whether he was atheist or theist, devout or godless.
Dostoevsky began writing The Brothers Karamazov in 1878. He completed it three months before his death, in October 1880. For the ten years before this, he had been studying atheism and belief with obsessive devotion. His second wife Anna wrote that he had devoured an entire library on the subject — every book concerning God and faith.
The Dostoevsky who in youth had been a nihilist, the Dostoevsky who in early middle-age began to believe in God and even imagined that Christ’s second coming would be in Russia — in his later years found his whole existence torn by the violent duel between belief and disbelief. He wrote: no subject had occupied him more than “Does God exist, or does He not?” His genius, his life’s experience, his wisdom, his study — none gave him an answer. And at the end he confessed: like his hero, he too did not know whether God exists.
On this eternal conflict of atheism and faith stands his epic novel The Brothers Karamazov — that supreme work which many call the greatest novel of world literature. Yet even here the riddle of God remains unresolved. Across time writers, poets, thinkers have read it and declared opposing verdicts. Some said Dostoevsky was utterly atheist; others, reading the same lines, swore he was deeply devout.
Perhaps it is so that all notions of God are so inscrutable, so wrapped in mystery, that one’s belief itself shapes whether one is atheist or theist. In this world of six billion, believers still far outnumber non-believers — because religion is stamped on man by birth. No one consciously chooses his religion with a rational mind. Religion is imposed upon him in childhood. The scriptures shape the future consciousness of man. Ideas of good and evil, sin and virtue, justice and injustice, greed and contentment, hate and love, envy and affection — these pairs of human instincts are all defined within the machinery of religion. Religion is thus like a dark chamber of spells: what is taught within becomes the law that molds human impulses.
Yet there are men who take the hammer of reason and shatter these chains of faith. They leap in one stride from theism into atheism. But in doing so they fail to glimpse the vast ocean of humanity, of history, of the heart’s depths. The negligence of knowledge that dwells in atheism is born of the same blind mechanism that produces the devout believer. The pain of the atheist is more severe than the faith of the theist, for the atheist must explain every cause and effect through reason. And in that labor he encounters voids, riddles, and whirlpools into which he must plunge headlong with no salvation. The theist has his consolation: he may cloak the world in epic grandeur or defer all mysteries to the afterlife. But the atheist must wrestle with existence armed only with this body, with physics and biology — no other reasoning is permitted to him.
Atheists themselves fall into two tribes. For man is such a creature that he cannot live without sectarianism. The first tribe is of the extreme kind — almost nihilists, anarchists. Every step of human life they see as shackled by rules. To greet another with folded hands seems to them another ritual of faith. Such atheists are kin to religious fanatics. For the intoxication of sectarianism lies equally in the seed of blind atheism.
Diogenes the Cynic was such an extremist, a primitive naturalist. He lived in a clay jar, practiced masturbation in public, scorned every boundary of civic life — incest taboos, the prohibition of human flesh, marriage, class divisions, conventional religion. To Alexander the Great he said: “Stand out of my sunlight.” Diogenes was a forefather of nihilism. Plato called him a mad atheist, a destroyer. He urged the public to stay away from such life-denying philosophy.
The second tribe are not extremists. They become atheists by reasoning through history, humanity, philosophy. And often the same reasoning later returns them to faith. They wander perpetually in the subtle dialectic between belief and unbelief — sometimes prey to faith, sometimes to doubt.
In 1955, a year before his death, Einstein wrote a letter to the German-Jewish philosopher Eric Gutkind in response to his book Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The world read this letter as Einstein’s candid statement on religion. In it he wrote: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses. The Bible, though venerable, is but a collection of primitive legends.”
Shall we call this Einstein’s outright attack on faith? Perhaps not. For what is striking is that Einstein here does not speak of God as a cosmic designer at all. Rather, he voices his lifelong disbelief in a personal God who intervenes in human lives. In 1929 when Rabbi Herbert Goldstein asked him by telegram, “Do you believe in God?” Einstein replied by drawing a distinction: between confronting the vast, intricate, harmonious face of Nature and believing in a human deity who punishes evil and rewards good. He praised the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, saying: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of men.”
In his letter to Gutkind he again invoked Spinoza, criticizing the Jewish claim to special chosenness through monotheism. He wrote that he was pained by the “walls of pride” erected to defend such privileges — as a man outwardly, as a Jew inwardly. He argued: to demand special status through monotheism is no true causality at all. Einstein insisted that while he felt deeply at one with the Jewish spirit, he felt the same oneness with the spirit of all mankind.
Thus, in this letter Einstein perhaps expressed the most meaningful idea: that any God bound up with man’s self-serving ambition, with personal privilege, has no place. He supported only that sense of the divine which purifies man’s existence, emphasizing its purely human element, dedicated to ennobling and refining life.
The duel between Science and God must, in the end, yield victory to Humanity — for it is Humanity that gave birth to both. The logic of science and the logic of faith are both born of the human mind. The atom bomb of science and the fundamentalism of religion are both monuments of man’s darkness. Neither is for the improvement of human existence.
Those who think that atheism alone destroys reason are mistaken. Theism too, like atheism, is not mere emotion. It can be an act of reason, embraced by the thoughtful. The theism of Vivekananda, of Tagore, of Tolstoy, of Gandhi — this was a theism weighed in wisdom and knowledge. Even the educated Karamazov, atheist though he was, succumbed to such theism — before which even Tagore bowed his head: the humbling of human pride.
“Bow my head, O Lord,
Beneath the dust of Thy feet.”
When Tolstoy ended Anna Karenina with the hope that God might forgive unfortunate Anna, he meant that God who is the God of humanity. Gandhi’s God was Ram, and his ideal nation was Ramrajya. To tie this Ram to sectarian hatred is the act of fanatics. Gandhi’s God was his country, his ideal, his people — mirrored in the imagined form of Ram. In his Ram lives the archetypal hero of moral history, not the ritual deity of folk religion. The Ram who worshipped Truth was the Ram whom Gandhi served.
A truly religious person can never be a fundamentalist. The religious man is he who sees his own ideal as his religion. To be religious does not mean to be theist. One can be a religious atheist. Conversely, one can be an irreligious theist or atheist alike. Dostoevsky’s terms — “fanatic” or “dissenter” — describe these types. If they are theists, they riot in the name of religion; if atheists, they impose tyranny in the name of socialism. Bertrand Russell once observed that Catholic discipline and Communist discipline were two faces of the same coin. In Catholicism the authority of the Church is law, to question it is blasphemy. In Communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat is supreme; the Politburo cannot be questioned, and dissenters are branded enemies of the class. In both cases, to sustain the chains of faith they summon the strongest deity of reason. For the Church, reason dictates that sins of this life may be washed in the next. For the Communists, reason dictates that a man should live by eating twice a day and fighting the bourgeoisie.
Yet the greatest power of this strongest of reason lies in its iron armor. That armor is near-impossible to pierce. And within that armor, the heart is hollow — filled with illusory utopias. Whoever does not believe in the Catholic Church has no place within it. Likewise, whoever does not believe in Communism or Fascism has no place in the Communist or Fascist state. Just as religious institutions persecute non-believers, so too did Hitler, Ceausescu, Stalin annihilate their opponents.
On the other hand, Vivekananda, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Dostoevsky — they built another religion altogether, a religion of humanity. A religion that imposes no yoke upon man, that is not stamped upon his neck at birth, that does not annihilate unbelievers whether theist or atheist. This religion builds no walls of reason, summons no tougher. It has no chains, no rigid discipline. Within it one may be believer or doubter, rationalist or man of feeling — but above all, one is a worshipper of humanity.
And in this religion, the chains of faith and the strongest of reason are both rejected. What alone is acceptable is humanity itself.
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