Meaning

Review: Anna Karenina

/ rtrube54 / 4 Comments

anna-karenina

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). New York: Penguin, 2000.

Summary: The classic work exploring the illicit loves and lives of Russian nobility against the backdrop of nineteenth century Russian class struggles and philosophical speculation.

For those looking for a “Cliff Notes” of this classic work, this is not it. Rather, I’m going to share some of my impressions on re-reading this work forty-some years after I first tried to read it in high school. I also can’t speak to the translation, except to say that the work reads easily and the dialogue does not seem stilted, as you find in some translations. Overall, it has been broadly praised.

The novel is kind of like a huge landscape painting with figures in the foreground against a vast panorama. What we have in that foreground are seven people in three sets of relationships against the social, class, and religious backdrop of nineteenth century Russia. It seems to me that in this novel, Tolstoy tries to address himself to all of these, which helps explain its length.

Of course there are the love affairs. We have the love grown cold between Anna and her husband, making her vulnerable to the affections of Count Vronsky, who is unwilling to content himself with a casual dalliance, but makes an all-out assault on Anna’s heart, with all the drama and tragedy that you might expect from such an act. One wishes that Anna’s husband would have challenged Vronsky to a duel (and we get the feeling Anna wishes it early on as well, as a sign that he really cares). Instead, he tries first to get her to confine her relationship to a conventional affair on the quiet. But neither Anna nor Vronsky can do this, and a bastard child makes this virtually impossible. The book chronicles their attempt to make an illicit love work, even though cut by society, and the struggle Anna increasingly faces as Vronsky also appears to cool in his ardor.

At the other end, we have Kitty and Levin who take half the novel to finally get together, and most of the remainder to really believe and settle with the incredible fact that they really and truly love each other. TV dramas that draw out love affairs have nothing on Tolstoy. We agonize to see them get together, and then delight to see a love that matures into a fecund relationship of child-bearing, homestead, and providing shelter for those not-so-fortunates around them.

Finally, there are Dolly and Stiva, who represent the hypocrisies and compromises that Russian society was willing to tolerate. Stiva likes the ladies, but not like Vronsky. He dabbles in affairs, and Dolly, after pardoning one of these, accepts that this is his character, and as long as he acts discretely and provides a modicum of affection, she looks, sadly at times, the other way.

We see the double standards between men and women that prevail in so many societies. We have men who are loving husbands, philanderers, passionate lovers, and cold-hearted, but none really pays for the kind of person they are. It cannot be so with Anna, who sadly, simply wants to be loved enduringly. For a woman to seek this, when a marriage has turned cold and formal, there was little alternative and less hope. And yet she risks all on her only chance.

Behind the foreground, Tolstoy explores the great questions of the day, giving us a panoramic view of Russian society, from relations between landed gentry and their workers to the philosophical speculations that shaped late nineteenth century Russia informed by an increasingly materialistic vision of the world in which cold science overthrew the structures and worldview of the church for many. At points, this may grow tiresome for some of us as we overhear lengthy disquisitions on these matters at various points. Yet Tolstoy, through the eyes of Levin shows us the hollowness of this all, the chattering intelligentsia flitting from one cause or latest idea to another. Perhaps the most revealing section is when Levin has to spend time in Moscow, participating in a series of these empty conversations, with people living above their means, and off the labors of the people. Meanwhile, Levin finds himself in an existential search for meaning as he witnesses the death of his brother, puzzles over the joy he finds in his work, and finds himself praying in the midst of his wife’s labor agonies.

Anna and Levin. Two kinds of life. One that is destroyed by a hollow and hypocritical Russian society. One that finds redemption in spite of it. That, for me, sums up Anna Karenina.

Review: Suffering and the Search for Meaning

/ rtrube54 / 9 Comments

SufferingSummary: This book surveys seven different approaches to the question of why pain and suffering if there is a God. This serves both as an introduction to the subject of theodicy and provides pastoral and personal resources for responding to people in pain, including one’s own suffering.

Suffering raises profound questions for every human being. For the Christian or other theists, it raises the question of how we are to understand a good and powerful God allowing evil and suffering. But even for the atheist, who can only say that suffering is, there is still the profound sense of the “wrongness” of suffering and why one thinks it wrong. Then there are the times where suffering becomes real in our lives, or for someone who we care deeply. At times, the numbness, or the outrage of suffering leaves one thinking no answers make sense. Yet few of us wish to live our lives believing it is really all senseless. We try to make some sense out of suffering, or are in the position of walking along others as they make their own sense out of it.

This is a book for those times. What the author does is survey seven approaches to this question that have helped Christians over time. The approaches are:

  1. Perfect plan theodicy: that all suffering is a part of God’s perfect plan
  2. Free will defense: that suffering is a result of human free will used badly.
  3. Soul-making theodicy: this approach finds meaning in how suffering changes us for the better.
  4. Cosmic conflict theodicy: this approach recognizes the role of the devil in directly or indirectly causing suffering.
  5. Openness of God theodicy: God doesn’t foreknow the choices we make, only the possibilities, but how we actually exercise free will is only known to God when we act. This approach has much in common with the free will approach.
  6. Finite God theodicy: God is not all powerful, the “when bad things happen to good people” approach.
  7. Protest theodicies: These are expressions of outrage against terrible evil claiming no God could permit such evil.

For each approach Richard Rice outlines the basic contours of that approach, why it is attractive as a response to the question of suffering, and what the drawbacks of the approach are.

His concluding chapter, titled “Fragments of Meaning” explores how one uses this material to help the suffering, whether the suffering is “theirs” “ours” or “yours”. Each is a unique situation with unique pastoral requirements. He suggests that in formulating our own theodicy the twin questions of What kind of world did God create? and What kind of God created the world? are key to the theodicy we form. Rice would suggest that most will form a bricolage, an understanding drawn from the fragments of different theodicies rather than favoring only one. For the author (who favors open theism but evenhandedly presents each view) his own bricolage consists of these four statements:

  1. God is Lord and God is Love.
  2. Suffering is real and suffering is wrong.
  3. God is with us when we suffer
  4. Suffering never has the last word.

What I most appreciated about this book was the conciseness and clarity of explanation of the different views as well the pastoral sensitivity that realizes that these are not “answers” we give, but resources on which we draw as we try to make sense out of our own suffering or walk alongside others. For those looking for the “right” answer, this is not the book, but as the author observes, in Job, even God does not really “answer” Job.