Confessing Evangelical

This cri de coeur from Linus (right) is expressed more fully in the following extract from The Karamazov Brothers, where the starets Zosima describes (to a visitor to his monk's cell) a conversation he had with a doctor some years previously:

"He spoke just as frankly as you have done, but with humour, bitter humour. I love mankind, he said, but I'm surprised at myself; the more I love mankind in general, the less I love men in particular, that is, separately, as individuals.

"In my thoughts, he said to me, I've often had a passionate desire to serve humanity, and would perhaps have actually gone to the cross for mankind if I had ever been required to do so, and yet at the same time, as I well know from my personal experience, I'm incapable of enduring two days in the same room with any other person. The moment anybody comes close to me, his personality begins to overpower my self-esteem and intrude upon my freedom. Within one day I can end up hating the very best of men, some because they've taken too long over their dinner, others because they've caught a cold and keep blowing their noses. I become a misanthrope, he said, the minute I come into contact with people.

"And it has always been the same with me; the more I have detested people individually, the more passionately I have loved humanity in general." (p.72)

This tendency is also described in CS Lewis' Screwtape Letters, where Screwtape advises Wormwood that, if he cannot banish "love" from his "patient" altogether, then better to ensure that that love is directed more and more to people on the periphery of the patient's life, reduced to a vague benevolence towards "humanity", rather than to the actual people with whom the "patient" has to deal with day by day. But I love the way Dostoevsky skewers the psychology of this trait.

(BTW, I only just managed to resist entitling this post, "There is no such thing as 'humanity'" - let the reader understand...)

The Karamazov Brothers is full of these sharp psychological observations. Just a couple of choice examples. First, one of the brothers, Dmitry, indignantly denies allegations made by his father:

"That's a complete lie! On the face of it, it's true, but when you examine it in more detail, it's a lie!" (p.91)

Which for some reason makes me think of Bill Clinton. Or Tony Blair on the allegations about "sexing up" the "dodgy dossier".

And then there's "the careerist seminarian", Ratikin:

...Alyosha, who was very attached to him, was tortured by the fact that his friend was dishonourable - and that not only was he totally unaware of this, but just because he knew he would not steal money lying on a table he considered himself unquestionably to be a man of the highest integrity. (p.107)