Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2009 

REVIEW

Two Beautiful Books

By Roger S. Gottlieb

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction by Rowan Williams, Baylor University Press, 2008

Sacred Attunement by Michael Fishbane, University of Chicago Press, 2008

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was an academic theologian before he became informal head of the Anglican Church. In this study of Dostoevsky's major fiction, he presents us with a compelling and relentlessly focused account of moral relationships. Williams explicitly disavows Dostoevsky's flawed ethnic chauvinism, but he otherwise inhabits his subject's worldview so fully that I will treat the book's ideas as belonging to both of them. Whatever the source, the book contains one of the most profound expositions of a truly spiritual existence that I have ever read. Whether it would be as affecting to someone who has never read Dostoevsky, and who was not (as I was) profoundly shaped by the novelist from an early age, I cannot tell. But if an encounter with Williams leads you to the world of The Idiot or Crime and Punishment, that will be gift enough.

Dostoevsky's world is filled with humiliation, loss, crushing poverty, physical and mental illness, casual cruelties, the sexual and physical abuse of children, despair, meaninglessness, political terrorism, and murder. (Sound familiar?) No one is compelled to commit the crimes that are responsible for this pain, and we are free to take the pain seriously, make it worse, or try to avoid it. The key moral question is thus how to be decent human beings in a world of suffering and freedom.

By displaying spiritual questions in fictional form, Dostoevsky shows us many ways to fail at being decent in this way. Williams suggests that the characters who fail all share a refusal to accept the freedom of a true human relationship, as well as a desire to either escape relationships or control them. Demonic obsessions with control or escape take a variety of forms: political violence and the willingness to sacrifice a hundred million innocents to usher in a world of perfect happiness; hyper-rationalized social planning that ignores human freedom; pseudo-religious totalitarianism in which the masses must obey, while those in power have actually turned their backs on God; violent and prideful religious asceticism; egotistical sensuality; or a drawn-out hosanna of joy at the beauty of God's universe, a hosanna which has forgotten the long line of children abused by their parents.

Dostoevsky's alternative to all of these is, as portrayed by Williams, simple, profound, and very, very difficult. It is to respond to others with compassion and sensitive attunement, to attend to others' needs not by substituting your own understanding or knowledge or strength for their own, but by a quality of loving attention that allows them to continue to develop, choose freely, and come to a better, truer life. Loving attention is never a substitute for freedom, and it is something that can change both people in the relationship. Like characters in these novels, we all construct ourselves in time, through the process of talking, listening, and responding freely to the demands of mutual responsibility. This process is never-ending. Therefore we must resist the great temptation of wanting to end it prematurely, to have the last word, to control what the other says, or to retreat to a place where we are talking only to ourselves.

What is particularly powerful about Williams's book is its relentless relationality, in which our connection to other people is absolutely central to our moral and spiritual development. This may seem to resemble other versions of spiritual life, but in fact it is distinct. In Buddhism, for example, moral development is a product of individual meditative and reflective development—the real work is done before the relationships, which will work out fine as long as you keep your own head together. In Judaism, ethics is first a response to God's call, which instructs us to attend to the neighbor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.

Further, to the extent that religious moralities stress the centrality of acting ethically, they tend to represent the suffering other as someone simply in need of help. The moral agent is set in his/her ways, knowing what needs to be done, able to rise (or not) to the moral challenge. In Williams's vision the moral actor is not so finished or settled. To live morally or spiritually is always to be in the process of expressing ourselves, listening to others, trying to understand and being misunderstood, and facing moral choices that can never be settled in advance. There is never any safe place—socially, spiritually, or religiously—from which we can avoid these demands and dangers.

Yet for Williams and Dostoevsky there is in God a foundation for the spiritual outcome of the process, and in particular a Christian version of a God who allows a divine aspect to enter history and suffer rejection, pain, and death. The God who came to earth gives us loving attention without removing our freedom to assent or reject, and in doing so provides a model of how we can offer that kind of attunement to others. What is key here is the combination of transcendent love and earthly suffering. The Christian God is the one, Williams says, who can be spat on.

Just as Christ's divinity didn't prevent his crucifixion, so no religious insight, saint, or text will necessarily receive a welcoming response. Like everything else in spiritual life, there is never any experience so compelling or definitive that it relieves us of the responsibility to reflect, respond, and choose rightly.

University of Chicago theology professor Michael Fishbane writes from an Orthodox Jewish perspective and has constructed what he calls a "theology" of Judaism for the modern age, one he hopes will avoid the twin dangers of sterile repetition of the past and rootless innovation. His "theology"—or what many might call his spirituality or religion—begins with the eruption into ordinary life of some intimation of divine reality. But this eruption—an eruption that for Fishbane is always in stark contrast to the everyday worlds of desire, business, politics, science, or the proclivities of human nature—is only the start of theology, not its goal. That goal is to adapt every moment of our lives to the divine reality. While Williams sees morality as an endless, self-and-other-changing conversation, Fishbane envisions a kind of spread of our initial sense of the divine into all aspects of our action and experience.

Rooted in Jewish tradition, Fishbane describes this process with reference to both the Written and the Oral Torahs, but also to the primordial reality of God that precedes and underlies them. What he calls the "Torah Kelulah" is a caesural opening in which God's creative power issues forth into a manifest universe that includes a system of natural law and the moral reality of human existence. It is the "kiss of divine truth on the vastness of world-being."

Not surprisingly for a Jewish theology, Fishbane takes Jewish textual traditions as central. But it is one of the creative gifts of this book that he presents a dialectical interplay between text and world in which various attunements to texts correspond to various ways of relating to other parts of our lives. The better we read, the better we live; and the more we attend to the actual conditions of our lives, including our specific historical situation, the more richness we will find in, and create out of, the texts. As we read scripture for its plain meaning, its spiritual inspiration, its philosophical profundity, or its ability to lead to that place of silence in which we approach the Divine Mystery, our connections to nature, social relations, and God become deeper and richer.

This approach is embedded in a book characterized by a passionately poetic devotion to the ideal of religious living, one that is serious without being preachy. When Fishbane tells us that the reality of God erupted into Jewish consciousness at Sinai, and that we have been trying to make sense of and respond to that event ever since, it is clear that he has been doing this in his own life for a very long time. And his concentrated prose and often poetic and illuminating eloquence help the reader come to grips with this task in a fresh and powerful way. As one example, his account of silence as a spiritual mode of preparation to hear and to speak is one of the finest descriptions of quiet, focused attention I have ever read.

Despite my enormous enjoyment of both these books, they both leave me with a little uneasiness.

My difficulty with Fishbane's book is that it tends to glide over the dark side of life and faith. In terms of Jewish tradition, we do not see much of Abraham arguing with God about Sodom's fate, Moses trying to evade God's call, Job's pointless pain, or Chasidic Master Levi Yitzchak of Berdichiv telling God that forgiveness on Yom Kippur had better be a two-way street—for surely we have as much to forgive of God as God does of us. Not to mention Elie Wiesel, who was willing, for all his piety, to imagine putting God on trial for His sins. Fishbane believes suffering needs to be responded to ethically, without certainty of success, but that does not seem too difficult for him. Yet here I side with Dostoevsky, for whom the essential religious question is how any mystical sense of the divine is to coexist with the reality of tortured children. Even in his discussion of despair, this basic problem does not feel particularly threatening to Fishbane. There seems little doubt that faith will triumph without breaking a sweat.

Like all superb books—and Williams's is one of the best I've seen in years—Dostoevsky also leaves me with unanswered questions. Two of these concern the possibility of politics and the necessity of God.

Dostoevsky was painfully prescient about the possible abuses of progressive politics. From his critique of liberal social engineering (Notes from Underground) to his devastating portrait of "revolutionaries" as soulless, manipulating, hypocritical, and demonically violent (in The Devils), he reveals how the idea of revolutionary social transformation guided by a radical elite can devolve into (or hide at the outset) a lack self-restraint, real concern for others, or even basic moral sensibilities.

But surely we have seen similar problems in religious organizations and personalities. While Dostoevsky himself describes them, his response is not to negate religion, but to hold up an image of an authentic, loving version of it. Is no such version of politics possible? Can we not do politics as Williams wants us to do face-to-face human relationships: express love and concern with a basic nonviolent respect for human freedom? Can we not include in our political conversations a willingness to be changed as much as to change others? If like Dostoevsky Williams thinks this is not possible, he does not tell us why—nor why he thinks that religion, with its long history of sin, should still be considered possible, while transformative politics is not.

The question of the reality of God is at the heart of Dostoevsky's last and greatest work, The Brothers Karamazov. If there is no God, suggests a character in the book, "everything is permitted." Dostoevsky is sure we need a sense of God in our lives to avoid this amoral conclusion. Only thanks to God are we able to distinguish between what we want and what is right and know that moral limits are rooted in a transcendent reality. Without God we have no limit but our own will, which ultimately leads either to meaningless violence, passive withdrawal, or mindless self-indulgence. And only with a vision of a truly selfless, all-accepting love that God alone can provide do we have a template for our own attempt to love that way on earth.

If Williams does not endorse this view, he does not challenge it either. Perhaps it is part of the job description of the leader of a major world religion to believe such a thing. Yet to me it does not ring true. A sense of love can be gotten from other places, including the beauties and generosity of nature. Many environmentalists believe that the earth is heaven enough for any of us, and this belief leads them to love and care for all of life, without the slightest necessity of God. And ethical guidance can also be found in a purely human world: in the self-given rules of a Kant, the existential commitment of a Camus, or the emotional connectedness described by feminist theorists.

If Williams has more to say on this subject, I would love to hear it, and to exchange views with him. As Holden Caulfield might have said, he's the kind of author with whom I'd love to go out and have cup of tea. That would be a spiritual delight for me, and would confirm the beautifully evoked understanding of truly human relationships he has offered us in this wonderful book.

Roger S. Gottlieb is professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Two of his recent books are A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and our Planet's Future and Joining Hands: Politics and Religion Together for Social Change.

Source Citation

Gottlieb. Robert S. 2009. Two Beautiful Books [Review of the books Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction and Sacred Attunement] Tikkun 24(2): 64.