Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
Subversive Orthodoxy is a place for people who are burned by politics. We're tired of culture wars and worn-out ideologies, but still have some hope that the Judeo-Christian story has something real to offer the modern world.
We take a clear-eyed look at how an ancient faith, often written off as outdated or oppressive, might actually help renew our public life, our imagination, and the way we treat one another.
This is not about nostalgia or picking political sides, rather its about undercutting polarization and re-humanizing ourselves in civic love and respect.
These voices provide a grounded, generous, honest faith that does not bow to the usual powers, whether that is the empire, the enlightenment, or the myth of endless progress.
It is about bringing back humility.
It is about re-humanizing our neighbors in a distracted age.
We try to do this through thoughtful conversation, reflection, and creativity.
If this resonates, we would be glad to have you along for the journey.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #12: The Underground Inspired Scorsese: Dostoevsky (Part One)
Fyodor Dostoevsky revolutionized literature by creating battlegrounds of the mind and heart where faith and darkness constantly struggle for dominance. His concept of "the psychology of the underground" offers profound insights into human nature, revealing how our willfulness often overrides our reason in ways that defy rational explanation.
• Born in 1821, Dostoevsky's life was shaped by trauma—his father's murder, a mock execution, and four years in a Siberian prison camp
• His novels explore the "underground" psychology where humans choose willfulness over reason, sometimes acting against their own self-interest
• Notes from the Underground presents an extreme example of this psychology through its nameless protagonist who rejects redemption
• His masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov demonstrates how various characters navigate the underground in different ways
• Father Zosima represents the path out of the underground through his radical approach to responsibility and forgiveness
• Dostoevsky's work continues to influence modern culture, from films like Taxi Driver to our understanding of chaotic evil
• His psychology validates biblical insights about human nature while adding vivid color and complexity to our understanding of sin
• Unlike many modern narratives, Dostoevsky portrays the full spectrum of human morality, from the darkest underground to genuine redemption
If you want to begin exploring Dostoevsky, start with Notes from the Underground to understand his psychological framework, then move to Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov for his most complete vision of the human condition.
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
Okay, okay.
Travis:Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821 in Moscow to a strict religious mother and a domineering father, a doctor at a charity hospital for the poor, who was so disliked by his serfs that they may have murdered him. Dostoevsky was just a teenager when he lost both parents and by his mid-twenties he was arrested for attending radical intellectual salons. His crime Reading banned political texts. He was sentenced to death At the last possible moment, literally seconds before execution to a firing squad. A messenger on horseback arrived with a pardon from the Tsar. It had all been staged an elaborate psychological punishment. It had all been staged, an elaborate psychological punishment. Dostoevsky had already said his goodbyes, already thought his last thoughts. He would later write that those final minutes changed everything. He never forgot the feel of the sunlight on his face or the faces of the men beside him who would never be the same. Then came four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp where he was forbidden to read anything but the Bible. He emerged broken, epileptic, impoverished and reborn. This wasn't a sanitized religious conversion. It was brutal, raw and unresolved. But it marked the beginning of what would become one of the most spiritually explosive bodies of work in world literature.
Travis:He didn't write books so much as detonate them. Dostoevsky's novels aren't polite explorations of morality. They're desperate dialogues between angels and demons, reason and madness, belief and blasphemy, and all of them happen inside of a single human soul Crime and punishment, the idiot demons, the Brothers Karamazov. These aren't simply books. They're battlegrounds of the mind and the heart. They had the uncanny ability to write voices that were he had the uncanny ability to write voices that weren't his own. Atheists, nihilists, mystics, terrorists, holy fools all speak with equal power. He didn't caricature. He inhabited the characters. That's why both Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn admired him. That's why Sartre and Camus called him a forerunner. That's why Jordan Peterson quotes him constantly. It's why monks and misanthropes both claim him.
Travis:Fyodor Dostoevsky was not your typical literary genius. He didn't look the part. He was awkward, intense, small in stature, with darting eyes and a nervous stammer. His gambling addiction once had him pawning his wife's shoes and then begging friends for the money to buy them back. He lived perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy, mental collapse and spiritual crisis. And yet out of this chaos came some of the most searing, transcendent literature ever written.
Travis:He wasn't trying to convince you of a position. He was trying to get you to look at yourself deeply and unflinchingly, to face your illusions, your justifications, your false gods. He believed the human soul was a furnace where good and evil are forged in agony, and he dared to ask whether salvation real salvation was even possible in this world. And that's why Dostoevsky still matters. We live in an age of spiritual confusion, shallow certainty and moral performance. Dostoevsky offers no easy answers. And moral performance.
Travis:Dostoevsky offers no easy answers. He forces you to ask better questions. Is freedom a gift or a curse? Can a person truly change? Can God be trusted when life is unbearable? What if suffering isn't just something to escape, but something that might impossibly redeem us? He's not a safe rider. He is politically messy, religiously unsettling and morally dangerous. He is also, strangely, fiercely hopeful. He believed in grace, not as a cliche, but as a terrifying and burning reality. His novels are like cathedrals of contradiction, where doubt and devotion kneel side by side. So this series won't teach you about Dostoevsky. It's going to bring you face to face with him and with yourself, because for Dostoevsky the soul isn't a metaphor, it's the war zone and the stakes are eternal. Well cheers, professor. Well, what an opening. It's quite, quite an opening. A lot to live up to well, uh, you've had a little experience with this guy, apparently oh, I taught him for a long time, many, many years yeah, well, as we get started, can you tell us um how long you taught him and what?
Travis:was the class, or was it multiple classes?
Professor Larry:Pretty much. I taught a class on the Russian realists in translation Dostoevsky, tolstoy and Chekhov, okay and we would read. I would read Brothers Karamazov every year for maybe 25, 30 years. I think that is crazy. So, um, uh, not that I I reread it every year, but most years I did, and most years in in, uh, in discussing the book with the students.
Professor Larry:You know you'd read a good portion of it all over again and, yeah, it's one of those books you know it never ends. It's, it's a constant conversation and one year you read it and you you kind of root for one character and the next year you root for another one and and it's, it's a very intense conversation that takes place constantly between all of these figures, these Saints and these Sinners, these murderers and these, uh, spiritual directors and everybody in between, and that that's part of you know in in the introduction. That's part of you know in the introduction that they don't. You know, when introducing the extremes, you forget that he also includes everybody in between, which means you know the marginal atheist, the partly religious fanatic, yeah, the partly religious fanatic, yeah, not just the extreme case, but but we remember the extreme cases because they become the most powerful and eloquent voices for their point of view yeah, and I, I like.
Travis:I like the synopsis in the intro of like spiritual. We live in an age of spiritual confusion, shallow certainty and moral performance. I'm not. I have not read Brothers K 25, 30 times. I have read it zero times and I'm part of the way in on it and I'm part of the way in on this one. I can show you how far I am.
Professor Larry:Oh, okay.
Travis:On Crime and Punishment.
Professor Larry:Yeah.
Travis:But that I truly have been reading. It's not like audiobook or anything. I've been focused when I read it. But even in just those two I see the spiritual confusion, the shallow certainty, the moral performance like embodied in characters, which is really cool.
Professor Larry:Yeah.
Travis:But the shallow certainty really marks our day, and spiritual, actually all three. Spiritual confusion, shallow certainty marks our day, and spiritual, actually all three. Spiritual confusion, shallow certainty, moral performance. So why, why so relevant? There's, that's part of it, right there.
Professor Larry:Oh yeah, and that's why you can see why Jordan Peterson goes to him for quotes, and and why Nietzsche said that he was the, that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from which he had anything to learn.
Travis:That's such a compliment.
Professor Larry:And coming from Nietzsche. It's very interesting because it explains the difference between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. You read Nietzsche, you know, and you come away with these telling aphorisms, these powerful paragraphs, even these arguments. But you read Dostoevsky and those arguments are given flesh. It's sort of like, well, what would it be like to really believe that God was dead? How would that change the way you lived? And and what if you believed God is dead, but the woman you love didn't? Or your best friend and your brother did and you didn't?
Professor Larry:Yeah, that becomes a scene in the novel. And, and that scene in the novel isn't there to entertain you. It's there to try to work out, okay, what's a human being? How do the beliefs shape who they are and what do they do with these ideas? Do they perform them and not believe them? Do they really believe them and then fake not believing them? The human being is a very complicated spiritual, psychological reality that Dostoevsky kind of redefined, and that's why he's kind of the father of Christian modernism, because he sort of redefined being a human being in a way that Kant and the German idealists never did. It's sort of like he had to write literature because philosophy had become too rational.
Travis:It was human beings aren't rational okay, sorry, so that that triggers me exactly to theology. It's like here's what theology has become so rational yeah I'm not going to read another here's proper theology book, but give me dosiewski. You know it's like a same same thing.
Professor Larry:I have a philosophy as with uh, theology then oh, exactly, yeah, and uh uh, milan, milan kondera, the the um czech novelist. He has a wonderful book. I recommend it. The Art of the Novel and the novel was born roughly. Most people say that the first novel was Don Quixote or close to it in terms of telling the story of a person trying to live the truth of their values in a real world and or an imaginary world that was real, not in a abstract philosophical space where you control the argument and you try to uh amass a rational purity that borders on mathematics. So so the inner life went to literature and philosophy forfeited.
Travis:And would we say that happened in the 1700s or 1600s with Don Quixote, or is he 1800s?
Professor Larry:Right around. I think he's 1611 or 16.
Travis:Yeah, I thought he was a lot earlier than some of these guys, huh.
Professor Larry:Yeah, so it's right when it happened. When we talk about modernity, we have these different definitions, and the Enlightenment is part of it, but it isn't complete in modernity, because modernity includes the Renaissance and the Reformation, things like that. Elie Wiesel I don't know if you know him he wrote a book called Night, A Jewish writer who survived the Holocaust.
Travis:Yeah.
Professor Larry:Won the.
Travis:Pulitzer, I know the name. I haven't read anything yet.
Professor Larry:Yeah Well, he won the Pulitzer Peace Prize, the Pulitzer Peace Prize. And he tells that he has a sort of a Hasidic story that explains modernity. And he says you know, right around 1600, man and God had a conversation. And man said to God you know, you've been in control all these years and we've been trying to you know, believe in you and follow you, but we don't really know your experience.
Professor Larry:So could we change places for five minutes, just so that I could see how I look through your eyes and you could see how I look through my eyes? And God says well, you know that I appreciate the sentiment, you know, but if I ever let you become God, then how would I know that you would ever change back? And man says oh no, I would change back. You know, this is just a thought experiment and I just want to look at the world through your eyes for even just a second and then come back down to being a human again. So God said OK, let's do it. So they traded places and the minute that man became god, he no longer wanted to trade back, and so at that moment, god became man and man became god and the spirit of god lives in man, and man plays as if he were God. And that's the story of modernity Human beings trying to become gods.
Travis:Usurping God.
Professor Larry:Usurping God's power and prestige for themselves. And he says you know, says it as a folk tale. And then he says and so this has gone on for 400 years and only in the last hundred have both parties become uncomfortable with the arrangement. And he's talking about talking about you know. I wonder if that quote's in your book.
Professor Larry:Uh, I think it sounds familiar it's in there yeah it's in there, and and dostoevsky realized that both parties had come uncomfortable with the arrangement and some of the characters are more uncomfortable than others. Others are more content to usurp the nature of people's lives and how they come to understand who they are and what faith is, and if God is even a believable possibility, or is it a human concept, or you know all those crazy debates that all his characters have. Yeah, so that's the world of dostoevsky? Um, it's. It's a world in which, uh, it's not.
Professor Larry:Uh, the arguments and the struggles between the saints and the and the sinners and the murderers and the psychopaths, and the murderers and the psychopaths and the aesthetic geniuses doesn't take place in rational Kantian space. It takes place in the lives of people, in existential reality, and that's the world that he describes. And that's the world that he describes. Now, when you, when you read a book like his master, you know, and all his books were, um, avant-garde literature in the sense that they were breaking all the rules regarding character structure, uh, or get you know, plot structure. He wasn't, he wasn't trying to write bestsellers or tell these comfortable or interesting stories about people. He was trying to get at reality and test these ideas against real human beings that he could imagine, so like every so, would you say, because that's not the only time I'm hearing this about Dostoevsky?
Travis:He's not. You have this quote in the book from Rene Girard about how it's not about his quality writing, would you say. It's almost not that he's a writer, even it's more that he's playing out psychology and philosophy through characters. And he was forced to do it through writing, writing fiction, because everything had become so empiricist.
Travis:He had to, he needed to have a theater to play out his ideas exactly, exactly well, and he knew it yes I mean that's pretty, that's pretty cool right there, just like that's pretty cool right there, just like that's a very cool, unique thing. Because he's not known there's multiple insults on his body of work as not the best, writing like flawed, and I'll read that quote from your book. Most of his novels and this includes a Rene Girard for the audience, this includes a Rene Girard quote, who is in our future of subversive orthodoxy, um, people that we're going to talk about? But uh, most of his novels are not great works but flawed, moral slash, aesthetic experiments, heroic attempts to solve insoluble problems, to reconcile christianity with enlightenment, skepticism, faith with doubt, terror with hope, and most of them fail. Even you said that's you talking.
Travis:Then Rene Girard even goes so far as to say Dostoevsky and his work are exemplary, but not in the sense of a corpus of work and a life without fault, but in exactly the opposite sense. In observing this author's life and writing we learn, perhaps, that peace of soul is the most difficult of conquests, that genius is not a natural phenomenon. So what did you mean by that? He's like, or whatever the nature are? I mean, he's just what you're watching a soul thrashing for meaning and and working it out through crazy amount of writing through their lifetime. Is that kind of what he's saying?
Travis:Well, yeah, the hacking, hacking, hacky, till you find something.
Professor Larry:Well, well you. You said it well at the beginning when you talked about his um life changing experience before the firing squad. Yeah, uh, he was not in the first group that were brought before the um gun, the guns, the firing second group right and the first group got shot second group and the first group. They fired blanks oh, yeah, yeah and the first group.
Professor Larry:Um, I think there were four in the first group and one of those guys later committed suicide. Another of those guys had a nervous breakdown. Another of those guys never recovered from it psychologically, went crazy, and one of them apparently survived and served out his term with Dostoevsky in the labor camp in Siberia. Dostoevsky himself, being, you know, in the second group, experienced it with the same degree of trauma pretty much as the ones who survived it, and that's when he became epileptic. From that point on, he had epileptic seizures for the rest of his life and in those epileptic seizures he would have moments of clarity that would precede the seizure, that gave him mystic experiences that informed his writing in terms of the characters that he had, who lived from their religious moments of sublime epileptic joy, as well as the suffering he endured living in a labor camp for four years. And you got to remember, dostoevsky was, I think he's 27 or 28 years old when this happened and he'd written a couple of short books, but he translated Balzac from the French into Russian. So he was a radical literary scholar and now he's being thrown into one of the worst labor camps in the world, a Siberian labor camp.
Professor Larry:And you know, a 28-year-old intellectual. Every mother raper, father raper, psychopath, enemy of the state, all in. You know this, this muddy barracks and just trying to survive among those people, needless to say, changed him and changed his politics and turned him from a liberal wannabe reformer who had joined a discussion group that had been infiltrated by the czarist police, to a guy who had decided that he could not waste another second of his life if he was going to be the next great russian writer, which the critics in saint petersburg so. So dostoevsky was living in this, uh, labor camp and had decided, the moment that he survived, that he would not waste another minute and become the greatest writer in russia. And this was not an impossible ambition, because he'd been told in saint petersburg by the critics that he was the next great writer, and this at the time are you saying he said that that happened before?
Professor Larry:yeah, before he'd been uh joined the discussion group and had been arrested, he'd been told by the local literary elite, who had read his first book, poor Folk, that it was a breakout, that he was the next great Russian writer and it went kind of to his head of to his head, uh, and, and a lot of descriptions of him at the time was where that he was a bit of a in terms of of you know, uh, thinking that he was all that and this uh experience he had being betrayed by the, by the guys in his discussion group who were czarist spies and sentenced to death for treason and then brought up and sent to this labor camp, really cooled his heels and he began thinking okay, I can't waste another second with ego and I can't waste another second not preparing to be the writer that I want to be, and so I'm gonna do my my time as well as I can and get out of there as soon as I can so that I can get on with the business of writing the, the hitherto uncreated conscience of the Russian people, which is not, like Joyce, an intellectual conversion so much as a kind of survival of his own soul under extreme duress.
Travis:And trying to represent his own, his people's soul.
Professor Larry:Well, to try to represent what the what the Russian soul was, and and realizing that it wasn't all that great that there was that there was, that there was a dark side to the human psyche that he had not really experienced until he went into that prison camp.
Professor Larry:And that prison camp changed his politics radically because that's where he developed what he called the psychology of the underground and that changed his entire worldview and another way of putting it, not so much a worldview, because that makes it sound sort of philosophical or Kantian. You know, it was a completely different anthropology. You know what shapes a human being. You know he's not a rational social animal. In one of in Notes from the Underground, dostoevsky says you know that the human being is not the rational animal, he's the ungrateful biped and he doesn't live for his rational self-interest. He lives to not be your fool and to not suffer your patronizing, that there's a pride at the heart of man which is Whoa almost like competitive more than anything, like I don't want to be put down, I don't want to be your fool.
Professor Larry:Right. Well, it's both his glory and his failure that we have this. What he learned in the prison camps were that the guys who survived, they would beat the crap out of you for a cigarette and and they would die before they let you punk them, and dostoevsky saying what is with this? You know, why would you die for a cigarette? Why would you beat somebody within an inch of their life for something that didn't matter? Oh, I see I don't really understand people at all. I have to recalibrate. And have I been doing this?
Travis:Wait, so that was in the prison camp.
Professor Larry:That was in the prison camp.
Travis:So he has these formidable, well formational events, obviously, first of all thinking he's the next greatest writer, yes. Then facing his death Right, and the psychology of all that with all the people involved. Then the third thing you just said yeah and and uh the uh.
Professor Larry:He wrote a, a novella about a life in the camps and um, for a life of just now, I, I can't remember. It's a famous little novella about the title.
Travis:Oh God I can find it real quick. Yeah, it's called House of the Dead, house of the dead, house of the dead. Yeah, now, um, along with that, I mean if you want to say something about that book or not. But that's maybe getting a little bit too focused on something there. Yeah, one thing I wanted to ask you is, like, before we go into another segment, can you I think it's a good time now because you mentioned it just unpack that, um, that theme that you see overall of the underground?
Travis:and that might help frame where we're going with other things yeah, so yeah, so he has the book notes from the underground which is told. I started that on audio and it was really hard because it was just like you're in one guy's mind for like an endless amount of time in the intro and I was just like I don't know if I can do this right now. This is, it was heavy. Just the just the start of it was not like a hook, it was like wow, you're in deep in some crazy guy's psychology.
Professor Larry:Okay, Well, you want to show me talk a little bit about that.
Travis:Well, yeah, yeah, you said. You said notes from the underground is almost like a way of looking at the world, or, or the underground is a metaphor or something you were telling me that you want to go into yeah, I do, I want, I wanted, I think that um the psychology of the underground as a cartography of the inner life yes, uh, I don't know what cartography means a map okay uh.
Professor Larry:So at one point in his career, when dostoevsky was famous, they, they asked him of all your novels, which novel do you want to have on your gravestone?
Professor Larry:do you want it to say author of interesting question crime and punishment, or our brothers karamazov, which, what is it? And he says, well, I want to, I want to be known as the discoverer of the psychology of the underground, wow. So he placed that at the Wow and what? And it's, it's not exactly fallen, it's, it's also elevated. You know, it's sort of like it's the thing which makes us willing to die for a cigarette. I mean, there's something Dostoevsky would have, would admire those guys, in one sense that you know, he was giving up everything just to survive. And then here's this guy saying you know, no, not my cigarette. And so he says well, what is that? You know, there there are people like that. I know people like that I have. I never knew that this was about survival. I always thought that they were just uneducated. So now he's got to recalibrate everything while he's in the camps, and it was a big change. And so the psychology of the underground is the linchpin.
Professor Larry:Now, when I taught these books, you know I couldn't read. I could only read maybe two books by Dostoevsky, and if one of them was going to be the Brothers Karamazov, which was going to take half the quarter anyway, to add another book was, you know, pushing it. You know pushing it, but I had to. I had to assign notes from the underground because it's the closest thing you get to a psychological portrait of the underground at its most extreme form, a person for whom the will overrides the reason at every turn. That's an underground person. That's the psychology of the underground, can you say?
Travis:that again.
Professor Larry:One's will overrides their reason.
Travis:Yeah.
Professor Larry:The Kantian notion was try to behave rationally. The Kantian golden rule was always act as if what you did became a universal rule for everybody. So if you can imagine a world where everybody stole, then maybe you know stealing is rational. But the world wouldn't work if everybody stole. The world wouldn't work if people lied all the time. So you can't get away with that. So the Kantian categorical imperative was it's got to be true for everybody or you don't get to do it.
Professor Larry:And the ultimate truth is the golden rule you act in a way that you would want other people to act toward you. You know, coming in 1800, having spent time in a prison camp, having been arrested for treason and sentenced to death by irrational courts and a totalitarian, authoritarian government who claims to speak for God knows that reason can be used against him in ways that further other people's irrational desires and that they're not living for reason, they're living for their whims. And so is there a better categorical imperative than that rational imperative that deals with the irrational? And that was the search in all the books how do you get or how do you act or deal with a world in which people are willful against their own self-interest? Just to spite you, just to spite you, just to troll you.
Professor Larry:What do they get out of it, you know? Is it just? Is it just pride? What can it be? Can it be disarmed? How would you disarm that? Can I imagine a character that would disarm that? So in the in the, let's just talk about notes from underground quickly, and then, you know, we'll get onto the notes from the underground. Well, uh, ideas about it. So the first it's got two parts to it. The first part is this 40 year old man who is describing his philosophy of life, and he has lived his entire life in the underground based on trying to assert his well over other people and not take crap and have self-respect even though it's a self-respect earned at getting fired all the time, not having Now when you're saying in the book context, what's the underground?
Travis:I don't know if we said that yet, did we?
Professor Larry:Oh well, they just call him the underground man. He doesn't have a name and he lives in what he calls the underground.
Travis:And the book starts with no context of what the underground is.
Professor Larry:Right. It's a state of mind that this character is embodying, so he is sort of the archetypal underground man of the archetypal underground man, an extreme example of the psychological type which is somebody who, when you go underground, you leave culture in order to nurse your own petty ideas and then you imagine inflicting those ideas on the world in order to prove that you're better than the people that disagree with you. It's kind of an identity based on resentment.
Travis:Sounds a little bit like social media.
Professor Larry:Well, yeah, it can be, it certainly does to destroy thousands of people to fulfill their sense of their own, uh, human nobility and and rights um, yeah, I was.
Travis:I was telling one of my friends, um, that he's listened to a few of the podcasts I don't know if he's listened to all of them, but about dostoevsky's coming up and he goes oh, I like dostoevsky. Is he the one that wrote notes from the underground? And I go yeah, and he goes. I love how that book opens.
Professor Larry:That's why I loved him immediately the book opens.
Travis:I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man, I am an unattractive man.
Professor Larry:Yes, and so that whole first part you know. If you can make it through the first part, you know, and then he talks in there about certain things that happened to him. Then second part is how he became this way. So it takes you back into when the underground man was 20 years old or in his 20s and you said what made him this way and it's, uh, it's the story of what made him this way.
Professor Larry:Uh, it, it is the moment where he went underground, which is to say he made a choice, a moral choice, to choose his willfulness over his reason, his desires over the desires of other people, and nurse a petty resentment that he himself was being victimized by the world around him. And this is the underground in its most extreme, sort of negative version. And so it tells a story of him and it's kind of I mean it's a very interesting story. Him, and it's kind of I mean it's a very interesting story. Uh, I mean it's a typical sort of dostoevsky story that he was writing about before. But, um, well, let's just, I'll just quickly tell you the story so just to overview yeah.
Professor Larry:So there's this guy and he finds out that they're having a high school reunion. He's having his high school reunion. Well, no, it's not a high school reunion. What it is is it's his old high school class is getting together to have a party for one of the guys who has just been given a commission in the Russian army, and he's going to be leaving St Petersburg and he's going to be going to the Crimea or someplace like that. And so the underground man who was never a popular person in high school because this is sort of classic, that resentment would be born out of isolation and urban life was going to produce more and more isolated people who were underground, who lived in their imaginations about.
Travis:It's proved true, right yeah, Think of like a kooky person who lives in their apartment by themselves in New York City and we've seen tons of movies about that person.
Professor Larry:Right, the Taxi Driver is the classic underground man movie. Oh wow.
Travis:Was it intentional or?
Professor Larry:related? I don't know if it's. I'm sure that uh scorsese knows the underground well. So is um the um, the one about the the boxer, um raging bull oh that's also that man also deniro uh that's also De Niro, that's De Niro and that's also Scorsese.
Travis:Oh, wow.
Professor Larry:And the story there is I give up everything my marriage, my body, my brain to be middleweight champion of the world. To be middleweight champion of the world Now, to be middleweight champion of the world is kind of a great accomplishment. But to give up your marriage, your family, your body, why would you do that? Why would a human being do that? Well, to show you that I am somebody, well. Well, is that pride or is that heroism? Well, dostoevsky would say it's both. And until we figure that out, until we're going to have problems forever. And I've been in hell, in this camp, and I've seen the demons and I've seen the people that have survived it and I've seen the saints that have been able to live with it. And I gotta write their stories, because people are under the false conception that some sort of ideology or utopian society is going to clean this up. Well, hey, look again. So that becomes.
Professor Larry:What happens in part two is, this guy goes back to this party and, as would happen, he gets there an hour early, so he got the wrong time. But he thinks that they, that they purposely told him the wrong time to make fun of him. So he sits in the back of the room and he drinks until he just gets totally smashed and he waits until the man of honor is allowed to speak. And then he stands up and insults the guy and talks about what an asshole he was in high school and how he always hated him and how he thought he was a big deal but he really was just a jerk, and insults this guy in front of all his friends. And so all his friends say well, thanks a lot for coming. We're going to go to the after party. Unfortunately we don't have room for you, and so they leave. And then he decides that, well, I know where these guys are going. They're going to go to a house of prostitution, because in Russia in the 1800s, houses of prostitution were run by the government, so they were public houses. So he goes to one of these public houses looking for his so-called friends, and they're not there. They went to a nice place, they didn't go to a house of prostitution.
Professor Larry:It's sort of like something that Travis Bickle in the Taxi Driver takes his date to an X rated movie because he doesn't know how to fit in. He never fit in, he was always an outsider. And so he goes to this place and there's a young prostitute there, full of himself, and he tells her that she shouldn't be in this business because guys like his friend, who's the soldier, would exploit her and that if she ever wants to get out of the business she should come and visit him and he would help her get out. And so he leaves feeling very, very brave and very noble but then realizes what, if she really shows up and she sees that I live in this hovel and that I don't have a job and that my life is a shambles, I will humiliate myself. So she shows up and he says gee, you know, I didn't really think you'd take me seriously, because you're just a whore. And he insults her and calls her every name in the book.
Professor Larry:Now Dostoevsky was experimenting with an idea in this story. In this story he had met people who had suffered, who were poor, who maybe even sold their bodies, and some of them had become really soulful people and lifted themselves out of their circumstances and had a sympathy for other underground people. That would shame all the powerful people in his society and he was wondering would a prostitute with a heart of gold be able to turn this guy around by her showing sympathy for him rather than contempt?
Travis:So we're in the notes to the underground story, correct, yeah?
Professor Larry:we're in the story and he's trying to imagine how that conversation would go. Now, these are scenes all over Dostoevsky and in the Brothers Karamazov. They begin on page one and they don't stop till you're at the end. So once you know what you're dealing with here, you're dealing with the battle for the underground. You know every single. You know what's happening on every page and it isn't some plot that's unfolding, it's a spiritual battle between uh, forgiveness and self-hatred. That's where it's at, everywhere, all the time.
Travis:Hmm, that is really really cool and powerful. And so she's, can I pause? Yeah, sure Can you remember where? You're headed.
Travis:Yeah, will you be able to remember it. If I interject something, yeah sure In, remember it. If I interject something, yeah sure, um, in. Now I'm forgetting for a second. I'm making sure you could remember where you were headed. Well, I forgot what I was headed. Yeah, um, oh, yeah, yeah, I know what it was. So it to, in a sense of like a lot of what we want to do with this podcast is like hook someone into, uh, or knowing what the hook is about, this writer or that writer like, or this person, and so I think I think what you're just describing sounds a lot like how someone hooked me into certain shows, where I think shows was, he said, the situations, the situational moral dilemmas are so compelling and complex. That's why you got to watch the show. Yes, sounds exactly what the underground's about exactly like, like, even.
Travis:Even morality is not black and white in those situations and the layers of complexity in a human heart, with morality and with not like, something's just blanket wrong. What if it's right in a certain context of a situation? That's something that I think a lot of Christians in the church has gotten pretty wrong with, like under of thinking in black and white, totally just about the Bible says this or that and, and you know, you have that, you have that, I'm almost done. But you have that example of like, of like. People lying to the Nazis to hide, hide Jews in their house is a great example, obviously Like what's better protecting this life or me telling a lie to a Nazi? You know.
Professor Larry:Exactly, and the fundamentalists want to call this situational ethics right and they put it down for not being absolute. Well, really, they're putting it down because it's not Kantian.
Travis:What it is. Kant as a philosopher represents real black and white thinking.
Professor Larry:Yes, well, I mean that there's a rational answer. And Dostoevsky, along with Kierkegaard, is a Christian existentialist. It's sometimes you're in an inexistence. Human beings are functioning with the will and the reason at the same time, and sometimes going in different directions and together. And you can have a guy who's trying to pump himself up as a good person by putting down a prostitute, and so Dostoevsky says okay.
Professor Larry:So what if the prostitute, though, was a Christian angel, who would not let this insult bother her, but see through the pain in this man's life that he had been put down by all his friends and that the only way he could get back any self-pride was to put me down. And I'm not offended by it, I, I don't take this seriously. I forgive him. So, in this scene, she says to the guy more or less I'll paraphrase I don't have it in front of me right now she says to him, after he chews her out oh you, poor baby, you really are screwed up up. Who did this to you? Now, what does he do? Does he come out of the underground and say yeah, you're right, I'm sorry? Well, not if you're in the underground. You can't let a prostitute be more moral than you are. You can't let her forgive you. You've got to reassert your superiority, right. And so he just goes crazy, and that's the moment where he is committed to the underground, in fact becomes criminal in his behavior, and that becomes the end of the, that part of the story. And, and then the very end, uh, dostoevsky unites the, the and the end where, now that I'm 40, looking back on the turning point in my life when I made the mistake to choose my will over my reason and myself over other people, and this has made all the difference.
Professor Larry:Now, another way of saying it is Dostoevsky was enough of a realist to think I really can't imagine a scene where a woman would be able to persuade a guy like that. I would like to write that scene, I would like to give lessons in that kind of change, but I can't do it. In a way, that's true, and because I'm a writer who writes the truth and tells you what I've experienced and what I know from what I experienced and what I know in those camps guys like that would not turn around, no matter how much love you gave them. Guys like that would not turn around, no matter how much love you gave them. And so that's the end of the story.
Professor Larry:So now, where? What do you do now? Well, I'm gonna write a book where I can imagine a way that love will turn around and underground, narcissistic, megalomaniac. But how? What would that look like, you know? So then, uh, he has um, crime and punishment. That is kind of another similar kind of exploration into a. Can I turn an underground person around? Can raskolnikov find redemption after giving himself over to the dark side, kind of thing. Would that realistically be possible? Uh, and there again there's a woman involved who tries to to turn him around and and bring him out of his underground, out of his underground shell.
Professor Larry:And that one you know, he, he has a somewhat of a of a turnaround, but it's not as persuasive, right? Yeah, so so then you say, well, he's, I see what we, we read him, I see where he wants to go, but he didn't get there quite yet. It was not persuasive. Same way with the idiot. The idiot is he was dramatizing an ideal Christian and trying to imagine an eccentric Christian who goes into— which I love the title based on that premise.
Travis:He's talking about me basically.
Professor Larry:The world thinks he's an idiot. But no, he sees through the underground. And what would happen to him? Well, I created a romantic Christian that I don't really think could exist in the world I know, exist in the world, I know, and so in some ways it's a failure as a work of art, but not in terms of a anthropological experiment, you know, a, a thought experiment in trying to imagine, uh, what a an ideal christian would be. And so then he, he moves on to his he's, he has this idea that he's going to write a, uh, a super novel called the um, the life of a great sinner, in which he tells the story of, of an underground man who, who is turned around and becomes an exemplary Christian but finds that it's too complicated to put into one character.
Professor Larry:The only way you could really talk about that dynamic would be in multiple characters, a polyphonic novel, where you had brothers and each brother represented the complexity of the human psyche in one particular incarnation, and then you brought them together and they had conversations, and then they had conversations with other underground figures, or other saintly figures, or half saint figures or half murderers, and that would be the way you could maybe bring it to life. So the brothers karamazov? The exemplary christian is aliosha, yeah, and, but you don't meet him as an exemplary christian. You meet him as the youngest brother of three extremely weird underground men one who's an underground sensualist and then one who's just a downright psychopath. And then there's another one who's the father of this family, who was the father of dysfunction, if you want to think of it that way, an archetypal underground figure for whom he sacrificed his own sons, for his own wellfulness.
Travis:Yeah.
Professor Larry:And then that plays itself out on all these levels simultaneously.
Travis:I found the dad, the father to be I'm not that far, far in, but I've got a, I've got a pretty good dose of each character and I found the father to be a lot like um, well, I'm sure that I'm sure there's plenty of examples in in movies and such, but there's a movie or there's a show called succession yes, of course that's a great movie.
Travis:That's very ghosted skin would you think, yeah, but what's what's interesting? It's so underground because I mean almost makes I'm later. I'm going to ask you where's the redemptive? You know stuff coming through, but about the underground or or in spite of the underground, but but like that movie, my, I've told a few friends this, that movie or that show, and another show called all the light you Cannot See. Have you seen that one?
Professor Larry:No, I haven't seen that one.
Travis:It's about a blind French girl using Braille to read classic novels through code for the US to bomb parts of Paris against the Nazis.
Professor Larry:And it's super powerful. That's very Dostoevsky and he could get behind that kind of a novel.
Travis:Well, what was, what was unique about these two shows? Juxtapose? Juxtapose to each other, because I watched them back to back you know, somewhat back to back. My thought from succession was you know, we couldn't stop watching it for one thing, but secondly, why can't we stop watching it? Every one of these characters is morally bankrupt. There's no hero right it is zero.
Travis:Like you start to, you start to sympathize with a couple of them, and then they turn and then, but nobody is good, like there is no good person in it. They are all out for themselves. They're literally morally bankrupt, it is. It is kind of like can you write a show like? Can you write a story like this? I mean, is that even? Is that even believable? And then then you go to all the light. You cannot see. It's exact opposite. Yes, all these good, beautiful people. You know Nazis being the caricature of evil in the situation, and then, but even one of the Nazis is good.
Professor Larry:Yes.
Travis:And he's functioning in a deceitful way against his own army, in a good way with the people he's not wanting to kill. So it's a really I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying, but I just noticed.
Professor Larry:What Dostoevsky does in Brothers Karamazov, which is his masterpiece, which comes as close as he ever came to defining the underground and then defining the way out of the underground in a believable way, at least for some of the characters some of the time, and with that it becomes a transcendent work of art. And so if you want to do that, you could combine those two movies would be a dostoevsky and create. You know, you have the dark characters who are running the world and then you have the, the characters of light who are trying to redeem it right out of the mouths of the underground, and that becomes the story of the brothers karamazov. And the good news is that he felt that he succeeded in being fair to all the different points of view and still having Alyosha come out as an exemplary Christian figure. Some critics argue well, no, alyosha doesn't come out as an exemplary Christian figure.
Professor Larry:The hero of the novel is the atheist and the story is really about the impossibility of an honest intellectual to believe in God. I think that's a gross misreading. It certainly violates dostoevsky's own goals for the for the work. But you know, if you're an atheist critic and you're reading dostoevsky and dostoevsky's being true, being um fair to all sides of the argument. Being true, being fair to all sides of the argument, you get to pick who you follow. Right, it's a polyphonic novel, so you identify with the guy who's most like, you Pick your hero and pick your hero, kind of thing.
Professor Larry:Whereas if you know Dostoevsky's life, you know the other books, you know the things he struggled with and the story he's been trying to tell his whole life, and then you know about Alyosha, and if we have a show where we talk about the Brothers Karamazov, there's so many allusions to Alyosha that relate to Dostoevsky's own search for meaning in his own life that you can't miss that. This is the story he wants to tell of how somebody could navigate the underground without falling victim to its tricks and its evils. Yeah, now I wanted to read you a couple of quotes here from Berdenev, because we did Berdenev on one of our episodes and not that you have had to have heard that episode, but once you sort of hear what Berd about dostoevsky, you might want to go back after you read dostoevsky or we talk about dostoevsky, uh to see where burdenia was coming from. But he wrote a very interesting book on dostoevsky oh, he wrote a whole book on him yeah and uh, uh, and he was.
Professor Larry:He was betrayed by the russian revolution, burden was a supporter of the russian revolution and then when the bolsheviks took over and stall and took over they, they arrested him for treason and they and he was exiled to the philosopher's ship in the middle of the ocean and later exiled to paris, to the philosopher's ship in the middle of the ocean and later exiled to paris, lived in paris and wrote about ex christian existentialism until the nazis took over paris and then he was driven out of paris and found his way back to the ukraine. And there's a couple of quotes here where he's talking about Dostoevsky and he says that he's talking about Russia and how Russia could have had this revolution against the Tsar that turned into an authoritarian state, that created a prison camp system. And so he says you know Russia if you look at Russia and its place in history. Russia has made absolutely no positive contribution to world history. Her only purpose is to serve as a negative example, except for the possible contribution of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy.
Travis:Berdiv said that.
Professor Larry:Yes, and this is what he says about Dostoevsky. In the final paragraph of the book on Dostoevsky he says he says so great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world, justification for the existence of the russian people in the world, and he will bear witness for his countrymen at the last judgment of nations for all their crimes. Whoa, now, that was. You know, you could see that he was probably, uh, you know, very emotional at that point, because he's probably writing in the 20s, you know, at the height that, in 30s, at the height that said well, no, maybe even later, maybe in the 40s, um, he's extremely angry at russia extremely angry.
Professor Larry:Um and uh, you know, and drzewski and tolstoy were not read by the communists. I mean they were. They were tolerated as kind of like precursors to the great communist novels, which were all propaganda tracks, um, until you got to, uh, solstice, and then the, or the dissident writers, like pasternak. But this is this is another quote from Rodenia that sort of explains what we've been talking about. He says Dostoevsky's novels are not properly speaking novels at all. They are parts of a tragedy, the inner tragedy of human destiny, the unique human spirit revealing itself in its various aspects and at different steps in its journey, and the reader is carried along into the hurricane. Dostoevsky was, more than anything else, an anthropologist, an experimentalist in human nature, who formulated a new science of man and applied it to a method of investigation hitherto unknown. His artistic science, the modern novel, his scientific art science. The modern novel, his scientific art, studied that nature in its endless convolutions and limitless extent, uncovering its lowest and its most hidden layers. He subjected man to a spiritual experiment, putting him into unusual situations and then taking away all the external stops, one after another, till his whole social framework had gone.
Professor Larry:Dostoevsky pursued his study according to the methods of Dionysian art, and when he has made his way into the deep places of human nature, he took his whirlwind with him. His work is an anthropology in motion in which things are seen as such an atmosphere of flame and ecstasy that they have meaning only for those who are themselves involved in the spiritual tempest. Involved in the spiritual tempest. A careful reading of Dostoevsky is an event in one's life from which the soul never fully recovers. It receives its baptism of fire. The person who has lived for a time in Dostoevsky's world has seen it, as it were, has seen, as it were, the unpublic forms of being, for he is above all a great revolutionary of the spirit, opposing himself to every kind of cliche, lie, stagnation, fraud and hardening of the human soul. So that's you know, kind of abstract language, to put it. And I think we're precisely persuading, we're praising Dostoevsky for his ability to take that out of abstract language and put it into the concrete.
Travis:I have a couple quotes of other people talking about him. So Kierkegaard, he never wrote extensively about him, it says, but his themes resonate closely. Especially I noticed, obviously, par paradox with him and a lot of these guys, um, birdie, birdie, evan, uh, chesterton too with paradox, um, but kierkegaard loved his, uh, exploration of despair and inwardness and then, uh, yeah, that was it. I don't actually have a quote from him, but then nietzsche said the quote that you said. Dostoevsky is the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn. He respected his deep analysis of human psychology, especially the darker sides of desire and morality. Yeah, um, though nietzsche rejected, obviously, christianity, he saw dostoevsky as a keen observer of the will and suffering. And then Chesterton had a unique take Dostoevsky is a man who knew everything except how to be a good man. And it says Chesterton appreciated Dostoevsky's spiritual intensity and insight into evil and suffering, but noted his tragic wrestling with faith and redemption. Chesterton viewed Dostoevsky as a profound but tortured Christian thinker who dramatized the battle between good and evil within the soul. Tortured is right.
Professor Larry:Yeah, and you know it's interesting, dostoevsky and I don't know, chesterton puts his finger on this, and but Dostoevsky thought that there was a reason why the dark side came up first. After, as a response to runaway rationality of the enlightenment and scientism, he said, you know I don't think there's a specific place that he puts it, but it's sort of like that there was a kind of rebellion that came up, that was the dark side first. There was a kind of rebellion that came up, that was the dark side first. It was sort of like you know, you can have your crystal cathedrals and your your engineering masterpieces and they will serve as targeting markers for nazi planes in another 20 years you could create, you could split the atom and in another 40 years they'll be using that atom to destroy 120 000 people, uh, in a day in cities in in japan. So it was sort of like dostoevsky thought you know that this dark side has has to be dealt with first, um, that you can't just, you know, spiritually bypass and jump into goodness, um. And how does he know this? Well, I think probably it has to do with his experience, right of being betrayed and being sent to a camp and of having to survive and having to admire the dark side of man as much as the positive side. But then seeing that it was his task to try to create the image of the transcendent and it is a kind of an anthropology, it isn't a theology the image of the transcendent, and it is a kind of an anthropology. It isn't a theology, it is a kind of spiritual anthropology of how do you bring the good into the world of the bad. And that becomes the story in the brothers karamazov, and what happens to aliosha and what he learns from father zazima, and what happens to father zazima in terms of his learning, you know, beginning his life as an underground figure and then finding uh god and and uh joining the monastery, and how far he got on his journey, all becomes positive. You know it's, it's. And so when in his last years it looked like he wasn't, brodus Karamazov was supposed to be part one of a two-volume book, and part one was supposed to be the origins of Alyosha and part two was going to be his current reality, and so it was going to take place in the present Russia, not like a retrospective, and he never got around to writing it, but he was able to give some speeches and talk about where he was taking it, and it was all sort of in the hopes of making Alyosha an exemplary heroic figure in a new way.
Professor Larry:The hero is not going to be the exceptional man. The hero is going to be the good man. And the good man is not special. The good man is only special in the sense that he knows enough of the underground to love. The stories he tells are filled with trauma and disingenuousness and greed and all of the, all of those things, uh, and unbridled passions and all of these things that become the mark of a great Dostoevsky story. But they, but he also has all the people in between, and that's one of the things you don't get at like in succession, right, you don't. You don't get a spectrum a spectrum and you don't.
Professor Larry:I mean, there was one guy, the, the, the guy who was married to the daughter, yeah, who had, who had some moments of, of normality. I guess you'd say you know that a less of a, of a person who was living out his traumatic self-doubts and hatred, but not enough to really fight back or show how you might respond to this in a way that could help heal rather than just survive. But that might be. If they do a season two, that would might be a great. It probably wouldn't be as popular because, um, we find the the underground more like like, um, a taxi driver.
Professor Larry:You know the that that whole movie is just a journey into the underground, yeah, uh, and the same with a lot of scorsese's movies. And now that he's, you know the one, the one, uh, filmmaker who, who tried to reconcile his christianity with his modernism was Fellini. And if you look at Eight and a Half through a Christian lens, you see a Dostoevskian attempt at hack, at bringing the underground, coming out of the underground, into the light. In what are you talking about? There's a Fellini's movie, eight and a half oh, I don't know that has.
Professor Larry:It's about an advertising executive who has to deal with, you know, manipulating people to buy these consumer goods in post-war Italy and he's having a spiritual crisis and he's trying to reconcile his Catholicism with his job. He's trying to reconcile his Catholicism with his job and he's making a movie in which he reconciles faith with commerce and succeeds from his own point of view, and it's one of Fellini's best movies. It's called eight and a half because it's, uh, the eight and a half year of his work as a director and it symbolizes for him his halfway mark and his turn to more explicitly positive stories and things. But he doesn't keep up with that. So eight and a half, it was really kind of the apex for Fellini for my money, but that's just my opinion.
Travis:Yeah, I want to transition to a few pieces here that I've got and I'm going to obviously ask you for your commentary. Okay, one is well, actually I'll just put this one to you as a question. Yeah, does underground like, according, according to dostoevsky, does his underground concept relate to you know how? Is it saying something different than the bible or is it just proving the bible? Um, in the sense of our hearts are deceitful we are. There is no one who does good. So the bible has a pessimistic view of human, fallen, human, fallen humanity.
Travis:And for the, for the audience, um, that is the main emphasis of most evangelical christians and maybe catholics too, is the fallen nature of man, which oftentimes eclipses the original goodness of like. Man was created very good, so there's an original goodness that gets completely thrown out the window. This is in a theological sense, but it totally relates to what dos, yes, he's doing here. So there's an original goodness. And then there's the heavy emphasis on the fallen nature, which verses in the bible that you know, mic drop verses like all have sinned, not no one who does. No one does good, not even one. Jesus himself saying why do you call me good? There is no one good but god. So it's very. The bible is pretty clear that there's a fallen nature to humanity. My wife and I were listening to a parenting book the other day and this lady said the whole premise of her book is that everyone is good and we are all good. Our children are good inside. The book's called Good Inside.
Professor Larry:Yeah.
Travis:And I said we can probably learn something from this book, but I definitely do disagree with the premise. And she said the whole book depends on that premise. Um, but yeah, it's the exact opposite of the bible and dilsievski, obviously. But my question to you, professor, is you know, we have drug cartels, political corruption, sex trafficking, child abuse, murder, um, even child pornography, about as evil as you can possibly get. What is Dostoevsky saying? You know different? Or is he proving it out in more complexity? Or how would you? How would you frame that?
Professor Larry:well with the underground yeah, that's a great question and we don't have volume two of the Brothers Karamazov where Aliosha will be able to put his faith into practice on his brothers as being beyond him in terms of him being able to get them out of the underground, Because Zosima as a spiritual director, and one way of reading Brothers Karamazov it's that it's a manual and spiritual direction, and there's plenty of scenes where where zossima is counseling families and counseling people with with tragic events in their lives and traumatized, and his response to them in every case is whatever you do and you're going to have to make your own decision, but whatever you do, don't go underground.
Professor Larry:Zosima says that explicitly In different ways.
Travis:Oh, okay.
Professor Larry:But basically it translates to to don't go underground, and what going underground means is don't nurse a resentment wait, are you saying he actually uses that terminology in the book?
Travis:yeah okay, so notes from the underground he doesn't ideas. Ideas like the idea of underground gets imported into brothers k oh, yeah, yeah I didn't know that.
Professor Larry:Yeah, I'm not there yet, I guess for example um, there's a, a woman who comes to father's awesome very early in the book, like oh, I might have read this one uh, where she's lost her third child um who's who's done her husband didn't care and stuff like that.
Travis:He's like oh, get over it, he's in heaven yeah, and woman.
Professor Larry:Get over it, he's in heaven and, uh, she can't get over it yeah she goes to her, her pastor, and says the it was the last part I listened to. Yeah, I'm uh, I can't get over the over the death of the of the child.
Travis:And she said, she said she could get over the first one she lost and the second one.
Professor Larry:Yeah.
Travis:But this third one she can't.
Professor Larry:Right. And so father Zosima says well, the, the guy who told you you know that that you, that he's in heaven is, is right, you know. And then he was. He was trying to get you to see that there, uh, that there's an order, there's goodness in the universe, you know, and, but you're not feeling it. And um, because he doesn't know something.
Professor Larry:I know because zazima is the only monk, who who allows women to come to the gates of the monastery to receive spiritual direction. None of the other monks will talk to women. So he says well, because they don't talk to women, they don't understand this, that every child that dies has a different degree of mourning. They want from their parents, and some want you to mourn for a week, some a day, some years, and it sounds to me like this little child wants you to mourn a long time, and you can do that. And that doesn't mean you've lost your faith. In fact, you have faith. That's what allows you to carry the grief. You have faith, that's what allows you to carry the grief. And so you carry that grief as long as you have to, and one day he'll give you a sign. Now what?
Professor Larry:did he do. He gave that woman hope and he gave her a way of carrying her grief, not to lose her faith, not blame herself, not blame god for the death of her, of her child. And so she says, oh, thank you so much, thank you so much, you know, you've you, I can live with that. Right, yeah, he didn't. He didn't say you know, I'll raise your child from the dead or something. You know, you'll have a baby that looks just like him and it'll be a reincarnation or anything. You know it was. It was a way of reconceptualizing her faith, in a way that dealt with the psychological reality that she was struggling with. And then immediately because Dostoevsky loves to work in parallels then immediately the rich woman with little faith comes in and talks to Father Zosima and she has a different problem. Her problem isn't that she's had three babies that have died. Her problem is that she can't conceive of eternal life and knows that it's one of the doctrines of the faith. And so this has really bothered her, because she would like to believe in eternal life, because without eternal life, all her money and all her parties seem meaningless. All her money and all her parties seem meaningless. But if she could know that the party goes on forever and the road never dies, never ends. Was that Willie Nelson song? Then she could enjoy her wealth and her money and her money and her, her uh uh, parties. And so, zazima, you know well, what does he say? To that does he say, oh yeah, you're gonna live forever and you'll have parties forever. Go home and enjoy your next party. You know which is kind of what she wants to hear and enjoy your next party. You know which is kind of what she wants to hear. But he wants to sort of sober her up but at the same time not drive her underground. So he says to her you know, you're asking me to explain to you the doctrine of eternal life, and eternal life is not an idea you believe. It's not an idea that you accept and therefore believe. It's more of a concept that's given to you as a grace by God and you can't just believe it by wanting to believe it. You come to it as a grace. Now, how do you come to it as a grace? Well, you live an eternal life in this life and I happen to know a woman who's just lost her baby and she could really do with a nice dinner, and she and her poor family, and you know they, they haven't had much food ever since the baby died. And you could invite her to one of those uh uh parties. And the the wealthy woman says I knew you would have nothing to tell me. You, frog, I came here wanting to know, can you give me this bullshit? And then gets in her little cart and drives away.
Professor Larry:Wow, now, who's the underground? Who's above ground? What's hope? What's despair? You carry your despair into the confessional with you. You carry it or you carry your faith in with your despair with the other woman. I mean, this is the human condition and Dostoevsky is giving you these incredible, you know, 3d goggles by which to view it. You know, the wealthy woman isn't bad because she's rich. The wealthy woman is underground because she's rich and it really isn't her fault. But she, even when we give her a hand up, she doesn't take it. And how do you deal with that? Uh, even even the most saintly spiritual director couldn't pull her out.
Travis:Yeah, that was what he was trying to do. Is like uh, jesus and the rich young ruler yes and he's putting salvation right in, right in front of him and he can't see it and that lady couldn't see it. So it's the salvation, meaning like the grace and the mystery of like stepping out of the underground yes, and so is man a sinner or is man innately good?
Professor Larry:Well, he's both. That's either. Or theology that makes you feel secure in an ambiguous spiritual reality. That should not make you feel unambiguous. You should be able to say, for example, the kids, for example, like you know, my daughter is a nursery school teacher and you know it is a rule, it is an axiom, that there's nothing wrong with those babies. They are god's gift and and you treat them with the love and respect, uh, that you know they possess in their eternal souls, right? But that doesn't mean, when they become teenagers, that they're not going to want to have lunch with their father and their mother, that they're going to want to hang with the good-looking kid with the fancy haircut, and it doesn't mean that they are innately evil now. It means that the underground is making its way into the junior high and the spiritual directors have to give the kids tools so they do not go underground. And the way you do that is you don't punish them for wanting to go to the party, right? You sort of say I know why you want to go to the party. When I was your age, I wanted to go to the party too, but we have rules about going to these parties.
Professor Larry:And there's there was a scene scene. What was the scene? There's a uh, there's a scene in in the brothers karamazov where he's dealing with um teenagers. And there's one teenager that, uh, um tried to uh to fed a dog a piece of meat with a needle in it to try to kill him, and all the other teenagers want to beat up this little boy that did this. And Alyosha is trying to bring reconciliation but he's pretty taken aback by the evil of this kid. But he doesn't want him to go underground and identify with that. So he goes. He asked the kid to take him to his home, the kid to take him to his home. And he goes over to and finds out that the kid comes from this family with a poverty-stricken family, with a father who's an alcoholic uh, who beats the kid, but not because he's he's like a twisted guy, but because he's just twisted guy, but because he's just, you know, has no control. So he goes back to his girlfriend and asks you know, do you have any advice on what to do with this uh kid?
Professor Larry:And so see, now we're getting into what would be the plot of a, of a secession episode that tried to say how do you heal the underground? I mean, how do you get these guys out of the underground Right? And it's not going to be a one step thing and it's not going to be easy, and we don't really know how to do it ourselves. We don't even know how to do it in our own desire. I know that when I'm working really hard and really good, I know I could go another hour. It's a capitulation to my my uh side that says treat yourself, you deserve it. You've been working hard, whereas if I just stayed on the job, I'd have it done in 20 minutes, you know. And so now aliosha is okay. Well, what do I? How do I deal with this? Right?
Professor Larry:So he runs into one of the other kids who's in this gang that are torturing the boy, you know, and throwing things at him, you know, for having tried to kill the dog. And he talks to the boy who's the leader, and he says you know, do you know this boy that you guys are throwing things at? And he says, yeah, he goes to our school. Just do you know this boy that you guys are throwing things at? And he says, yeah, he goes to our school, just do you know where he lives. And he takes the boy over to the house and shows him how the boy lives in poverty and his dad's a drunk and his mother has like 15 kids that she's trying to raise, doesn't have any time for the boy, and he shows the kid that this house.
Professor Larry:And then the kid says oh gee, you know, I'm sorry, I didn't realize this. Um, I I'll talk to the guys and we'll, we'll back off, uh, on him for a while, back off on him for a while. And so that's the beginning of how these little seeds of goodness, you know, begin to infiltrate an underground situation. But if you had just taken that boy out of his family and given him to a foster home boy out of his family and given him to a foster home, that that wouldn't have been as organic a reconciliation to his community as aliosha discovers, just by getting his hands dirty, right, yeah, and suffering the whole thing out. That's a good word, and so that's what? What? That's a good word, and so that's like a scene in a Dostoevsky novel.
Travis:Yeah.
Professor Larry:And you go. My God, I'm learning about what life is. Why didn't anybody tell me this? They give me these formulaic answers for everything in the modern world that all derive from the Kantian imperative, and the Kantian imperative doesn't take into account the dual nature of man. He's not fallen, he's not saved. There's a dual nature. He moves in and out of the underground and he's tempted by the underground. And I named it and I said this is not a perpetual state of man, this is an aspect of human nature that the modern world is bringing up for examination. And where, where all these school shooters come from, that's the underground. It's like the world telling you, fix the underground, get people out of the underground, and we don't listen to it.
Travis:Yeah.
Professor Larry:And so that's his message. And so you know you read Dostoevsky and you know you'll be surprised when you know, just talking about it today, you start reading that. Just the background history of the families, the background history of the families of the, the Carol's Mazov's family. You know where he goes through, the, the like all novels of that 18th century. Did they give you the family history? Yeah Well, in a Dulcevsky family history it's the history of trauma, it's a trauma tree.
Professor Larry:Which is which is reality too, which is reality, and then this is where this came from, and you and you're thinking this dostoevsky what a dark bastard. You know why does he have to tell us every dark thing that happened to every family member in the in the care of mazoff's family tree? Well, because he's trying to tell you the story that the other novels didn't tell you because they were a little too hands-offish when it came to dealing with, uh, the dark side as well as the light side of human existence.
Travis:Kind of like a problem with Disney and a problem with Hallmark. Yes, and probably 80% of pop culture.
Professor Larry:Yes, and then when you want to have the evil, it's a caricature. It's just one guy who's just absolutely evil. Now this new I think it's a Pixar movie or I don't know what it is the Bad Guys 2. I hear it's an animated movie about the cartoon bad guys.
Professor Larry:Um, get um, uh, restorative justice that's funny concept yeah, and they're brought back into harmony with their world. Uh, and I think I I can just imagine it being a very funny movie, because you know, restorative justice is something that that Dostoevsky is into, but not in a in necessarily in a programmatic way. You know it's it and it, and I'm sure that this, this movie, probably plays with that. You know what restorative justice would really look like for a cartoon bear or something. You know what would that, uh, and the results would be pretty funny. But I think the.
Travis:I think the um, the underground, kind of exposes, like you know, as we still see, it's completely active, the underground. It's maybe more, maybe always been just as active or maybe more active than ever. Um, as like a chaos agent in our, in our world, because now you hear about so many more things happening because of social media and phones recording things and and such. It may have always been the same level all along, but we're more aware of it now because of all of that, and I think in the traditional christian view, you know, the way out of the underground. To me as an evangelical pastor, all these years was like people just need to hear about jesus, they just need to repent and receive grace and they'll be transformed. It was almost, almost that formulaic, yeah, um, but to modern people that are not necessarily evangelical or or christian in any sense, you know they've tried with their ways, which has been like education, um, being the number one probably through all the years, where people think education's the answer yeah um technology.
Travis:In some ways now we see it more as a problem. Economic reform, you know, people think, oh, if people weren't poor, if people weren't in bad situations, they wouldn't. You know, all this bad stuff wouldn't happen. And then obviously, political revolution. People think, oh, it's because of these policies, so it's all blaming something on external.
Travis:Yes, and it seems like Dostoevsky's saying you know there's no formula for this. That's all sounds really naive. Even if you fix external conditions, what we have here is a problem that's very irrational and proud and self-destructive in the human heart.
Professor Larry:Right. And so the first step and that's why you know conversion, or you know, giving yourself over to Jesus is a great first step because it reverses the field on the underground right. It's like I'm not going to fall my will over my reason, or even my will over my faith. I'm going to give myself over to a larger power, not my own agenda.
Travis:My own chaos rule, which it does affirm the idea of AA, where people who have lived chaos where people who have lived chaos.
Travis:A word that I hear in this underground concept is chaos. So the chaos of your own will impulsive, will like doing what you want in the moment, and it may not even make sense to even yourself or your conscience. And we've all done that. You know, you've had, we've all had a time where we did something. We're I don't know why I did that or I don't know why I said that, and you know teenagers and children do that especially, but we do even as adults, and I know there's times where I did something that really hurt someone and I'm like I literally don't know why I did that. I'm really sorry and um, but like the where I was going with that is that um crap.
Professor Larry:I forgot Um, but like the where I was going with that, is that um crap I forgot Hang in there it might come back.
Travis:We got yeah, we can edit though. Yeah, um, what was I saying right before that?
Professor Larry:Yeah.
Travis:Oh the chaos. So one of the one of the movies that it it uh reference like when I looked up like what movies represent Dostoevsky's um concept of underground, the Joker comes to the top too, along with taxi driver. So Joker, the movie, um, the movie from 2019 with um Joaquin phoenix, and it's a very it's a guy who's like very emotionally disturbed and socially awkward and starts to find, you know, find vision and being chaotic. Yeah, um, and same as the other joker, and the dark night rises. Um, that Joker, he, he says his motive is is chaos.
Professor Larry:Yeah.
Travis:Which, you know, I was telling my son the other day. We were talking about villains in all the movies, all the all the comic movies, and we both agree that Joker was the best. And I said, you know what I say? You know what I think about Joker is that, um, most villains have, like something they're trying to get, like gold or money or um control or power. And to the joker in that movie, it was none of that, it was just chaos. Yeah, and I think that's very real.
Travis:To like a shooter, a mass shooter or a it's like that impulsive curiousness where it's like what would happen if I do this? Well, I'm going to do that and they start building this, this plan, in the underground of their, of their heart and mind, and literally on the dark web of the internet. And, um, what it? What it tells me about? Like the human heart has this propensity to total chaos. That isn't right and isn't rational. And that's like what? What dosius? He's actually like affirming that. He's almost like proving the bible more true than we ever thought, because we thought sin meant like disobedience to god's law. But he's saying he's saying it's like rebellion against meaning itself. Yeah, very well put, which that's pretty gnarly. That word means getting smashed by a wave into some rocks, um, and then another contrast like evil. In the Bible evil is like deviation from good, but it sounds like in dos yes, key saying evil can be conscious revolt against good for the sake of asserting self-will.
Travis:So it can be like actively revolting against good, not just deviating and that's, and that's what one of Alyosha's brothers says, and then one of the other contrasts was like in the biblical view, all have sinned and need grace, but in Dostoevsky's Underground, humans often sin deliberately, irrationally and pridefully, even knowing it will hurt them or others, Right? So it's almost like sin in color, and the Bible is giving you the basic framework and then Dostoevsky is filling it in with color.
Professor Larry:Yes, yes. Boy that's well put. Okay, let me just go a little bit over here, and then we can edit it down.
Travis:One of the things that Father Zosima who's—. Can you pause for one second? I've been having to go to the bathroom for a while.
Professor Larry:Okay, I don't know whether we want to save this quote for when we—if we do another one about the Brothers Karamazov.
Travis:Oh, we are, we are definitely.
Professor Larry:Okay, because there but this might be a little part of it that we could tease with it Because the book is, you know, dealing with the underground and the ubiquitous nature of the underground. I mean it's, it's, it's everywhere to some degree. I mean it's, you know, not every family has a criminal or, you know, a willful person rebelling, but there's always conflict and there's always willfulness and and imperfection and dysfunction and this is part of the human condition.
Professor Larry:It shouldn't be anything that scares you. And Aliosha is, and Zosima is the one who said you know, I mean, he began his life as an underground figure and then, when he saw through it, saw himself through the eyes of the people that were suffering under his willfulness. That's when he had his conversion. And so one of the things that he says and this is a way of thinking of it, if you're a philosopher out there that the Kantian imperative. You know that I should act in a way that if it were a universal law, you know it would be good to all people. Right to treat others as you would like others to treat you. Zosima raises the stakes, like you were saying. You know evil in 3D or evil in technicolor I guess that's what Nazism is or you know the cult movements of history that have destroyed people. Zosima says his rule of thumb is I am responsible for not only myself, but for everyone else, and I more than anyone else.
Travis:Can you say it again?
Professor Larry:I am responsible not only for my behavior, but for the behavior of everyone else.
Travis:What does he mean?
Professor Larry:Well, what did I contribute to the fact that we live in a technological society where children are made vulnerable to visions of darkness that they are not psychologically prepared to defend themselves against, or or what didn't I do that made that possible, right? Yeah, so for zazima, the kind of like um christ figure in the in the novel, it's sort of like that's a question to ask yourself when, when you're confronted with a problem Like you know, okay, my kid wants to go to the party and I don't trust the kids that are at that party. Well, what did I do to contribute to this? Did I talk about how I love my parties I went to when I was a kid, you know? Am I? Am I in some way contributing to this? And, and that becomes part of the, the spiritual discernment of the.
Professor Larry:There's that scene in in g. The woman comes to Gandhi and says you know, my son won't stop eating sugar, and could you tell him not to eat sugar because it's destroying his teeth? And Gandhi says, yeah, but you have to give me two weeks. And so two weeks go by and he tells. He says, he tells the kid, you know now you shouldn't, uh, eat sugar. And the mom says well, why did you make me wait two weeks for you to tell him that? And he says well, because I was eating sugar and I had to fast for two weeks in order to cleanse myself.
Professor Larry:To say that with some authority, that's awesome and that's. You know that that's what jesus in the bible you know, right, he spoke with authority. He didn't speak like the scribes, who you know, and the philistines who whom pharisees, pharisees who memorized the aphorisms. But then you know, where are they carrying the disease with them, or the, you know, the human stain, and we're all carrying the human stain. One last example, and this will be it. Okay, and then we'll do the Brothers K another time. You want to do that Because it's getting pretty late, right?
Travis:Yeah, I got to go in one minute, but it may not be just Brothers K, I think everything was good, so we may just have more episodes than we thought.
Professor Larry:Okay, Well then we'll. We'll do. Maybe the gambler? The gambler is a classic underground man got a thing and it deals with addiction as an underground attribute. And they'll see ask you, suffered from gambling addiction?
Travis:Yeah, so it's, and they made it and he wrote it, and he wrote it in 30 days in order to pay off gambling debt.
Professor Larry:Right.
Travis:It's going to be crazy to talk about that one.
Professor Larry:The other thing is also he some of his novels he ends, you know, without totally resolving them, because he needed the money and he had to get and they paid him by the page, and they paid him by the page. So, okay, you know, I can get this in by the end of the month in order to pay my gambling debt and my rent, but it's not going to be as good.
Travis:Yeah.
Professor Larry:And I'm willing to make that deal. But the brother's Karamazov was the one where he he felt he he had made yeah, he didn't cut corners that this was the real deal and that if he just lives long enough he'll be able to write volume two. But there might be some reason he never wrote volume two. It might've been a disappointment, you know. It might not have followed up on on the um, the vision that this book, uh, lets us invent.