The Bard, Tanya, All,
Has anyone ever read 'The Brothers Karamazov' by Fyodor Dostoyevsky? It's
the best book I've ever read, and by reading it i finally had an
understanding of what Nietzsche meant when he said 'God is dead. God died of
his love for man.' In Dostoevky's Grand Inquisitor scene, Jesus Christ comes
back to life during the Spanish Inquisition and revives a dead girl at her
funeral. The Grand Inquisitor promptly has him arrested and asks him why he
returned to the earth. He tells him that tomorrow He will be burned at the
stake and that his own people will provide the stones for the fire. The next
part hit me harder than almost anything else i can remember, but I don't want
to get into too much detail. the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that he had
the option of commanding men to follow him by the use of miracle, mystery,
and authority (these being the three temptations offered to him in the
desert). But he refused and said that men should follow him on faith alone.
This free will that man received was too much for him to bear. If they were
commanded to follow Christ, it would have been easier. ("You were a god, but
humans, are they gods?) God overestimated Man's ability. God loved man SO
much, that he trusted man to come to Him from his own free will. But the
Jesuits of the Inquisition see the folly in God's plan, so they decide to do
God's work and lie to Man. They tell him that he can do what he wants and
all will be forgiven in Christ's name, they tell him what is good and what is
evil, they tell him how to live his life. When man can rise out of this life
and see through the lie of the Church, he is "Beyond Good and Evil" and no
longer needs the lie for a crutch. This is why the Inquisitor said that God
would be burned at the stake tomorrow and that his own people would provide
the stones for the fire.
Nietzsche believed in an intellectual uprising of new philosophers that would
overthrow the old way of thinking. Nietzsche hated the Church, and he saw
most of the problems of Christianity, or 'the lie,' stemming from the church.
Nietzsche said that free will is a device used by the Church to make people
feel bad about themselves. "You chose to do it, it's your fault, you must
change." But Man, he says, has already been made to be a certain way and
cannot change what he does.
Christians are castrates, according to him. For an act to truly be Beyond
Good and Evil, it must come from the convictions of the individual who is not
acting to please a god. That might be why he said, 'Any act performed out of
love is beyond good and evil.' But I don't think he means love of God or
love of man, but love for oneself. If one loves one's self, they will do
whatever they can to better the self and overcome their previous ways of
thinking. "Life is that which must overcome itself" and "We must revolt
against everything that is and everything that is no longer becoming." The
latter hit me as a powerful DQ-affirming statement.
And by the way, don't think that i subscribe to the beliefs of Nietzsche or
Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, they just interest me very much.
Rumi is one of my favorite poets, along with Allen Ginsberg and Octavio Paz.
The love he spoke of was blissful surrender:
The way of love is not
a subtle argument.
The door there
is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they're given wings.
--Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks
If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.
rasheed
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