Further Thoughts on Truth, Lies, and Denial - Dostoevsky
St Thomas More - Martyr for Truth
About six months ago, I began reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” for the first time. I had heard it discussed in an online interview with Jordan Peterson and I became curious. In my youth I would usually take up a book and read it through from start to finish. In my later years, I tend to be reading more than one book at a time. Dipping in and out of different ones as time permits. As an aside, I am also becoming more and more conscious of just how much time I spend online and I am questioning how much of this is necessary; how much is beneficial; and how much perhaps is even detrimental to both my spiritual and mental well-being. If you google the dangers of social media for young people, you will find quite a number of articles stating that social media is proving to have a damaging affect on the mental health of our young people. I think it can negatively affect any of us if we are not careful. So I thought it would be a good idea to get back to regularly reading books.
I had left the book down for a while and then, two weeks ago, I picked it up again and began reading where I had left off. The Elder of the local Monastery, Fr Zossima, has died, and Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov, one of the three brothers of the title of the book, has written up Fr Zossima’s life story as it was told to him by the Elder Zossima.. It is called ‘The Russian Monk’ Today I read about the mysterious visitor who came to Fr Zossima, before he became a monk.
The story is capable of being read apart from the book, so I have uploaded it to my website at the following link.
https://www.truedevotions.ie/articles/the-russian-monk-brothers-karamazov-dostoyevsky.pdf
The events occur when Fr Zossima was a young man and an Officer in the Russian army. There was a beautiful and intelligent young girl that he wanted to marry, but he was too selfish and enjoying the bachelor life too much to even bother to ask her. He was transferred out of the district where she lived for two months and when he came back, she had married a respectable gentleman of the town. They had been betrothed from quite some time but Fr Zossima was unaware of this. His conceit had blinded him to the reality that this young girl was not really interested in his advances and his hurt pride left him infuriated by this turn of events.
He decided that he would get his revenge on the gentleman in question. So, he took advantage of a gathering which allowed him to insult the gentleman in the company of his peers. The gentleman in question challenged him to a duel to defend his honour. This is exactly what the young Fr Zossima wanted. An opportunity to kill his rival for the lady’s affections.
The evening before the duel was to take place, Fr Zossima was in a “savage and brutal” humour. He flew into a rage with his orderly, a man named Afanasy, and he beat him very badly about the face leaving him covered in blood.
He woke up the following morning with a vile and shameful feeling. He knew that it was not fear of the duel or of being killed. Suddenly, he realised that he was ashamed of the way he had treated Afanasy and that this was disturbing him. The words of his brother Markel, who was eight years older than Fr Zossima and was just seventeen when he died, came back to him.
“My dear ones, why do you wait on me, why do you love me, am I worth your waiting on me?”
Fr Zossima begins to question his own worth and wondered how he could have treated his servant so badly. The words of his brother to his Mother also came back to him.
“Mother, my little heart, in truth we are each responsible to all for all, it’s only that men don’t know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once.”
The young soldier, who would become Fr Zossima, broke down and wept bitterly and a great change came over his heart. Before heading out for the duel, he apologised to his servant Afanasy for hitting him the evening before. At first the servant was startled and a little frightened to see his master behave so. Fr Zossima then bowed his head to the ground before Afanasy and again asked his forgiveness. Now it was Afanasy’s turn to break down crying.
Fr Zossima, accompanied by his second, headed out for the duel. In those days the two men stood twelve paces apart and the challenger was allowed to take the first shot. The shot grazed Fr Zossima’s cheek and ear. He thanked God that nobody was killed and then, rather than take his own shot, he threw his pistol into the nearby wood.
He then asked forgiveness of his adversary. They all gave out to him and began shouting at him completely taken aback at what he had done and unsure of his reasons for it. Fr Zossima addressed them.
“Gentlemen, is it really so wonderful in these days to find a man who can repent of his stupidity and publicly confess his wrongdoing?”
When his second told him that a duel was not the place for this, he replied.
“That’s what’s so strange. For I ought to have owned my fault as soon as I got here, before he had fired a shot, before leading him into a great and deadly sin; but we have made our life so grotesque, that to act in that way would have been almost impossible, for only after I have faced his shot at the distance of twelve paces could my words have any significance for him, and if I had spoken before, he would have said ‘he is a coward, the sight of the pistols had frightened him, no use to listen to him.’
“Gentlemen,” I cried suddenly, speaking straight from my heart, “look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are sinful and foolish, and we don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.”
For a while Fr Zossima becomes the talk of the town. He resigns his army position and says that he is going to join a monastery. All of this leads up to the story of “The Mysterious Visitor”. It is a hauntingly poignant and beautiful story, masterfully told. I recommend reading it at the link above.
It tells the story of a well respected man with a great secret. He has committed what they call the perfect murder and he is totally beyond suspicion. But his secret is ruining his life and causing him to be miserable. He is unable to truly love his wife and his three children because he realises that he is so unworthy of them. The story tells of his struggles to face up to what he has done by publicly confessing his crime. He realises that he might lose everything, but everything he has seems to be almost an illusion on account his awareness of what he really is.
One of the things that I have noticed in my life is that so many people seem unwilling to take responsibility for their actions when they have a negative outcome. We love to blame others or to blame circumstances for what, inevitably, are our own failings. The opposite is probably also true. We love to claim credit for positive results.
Nobody likes to be poorly thought of and this is a part of what gives so much power to the propagandists. People will accept and propagate lies rather than be called names. Gender ideology gives classic and recent evidence of this problem.
To give an example. In Ireland, two dangerous male sex-offenders were housed in a women’s prison. Both of these men, had declared themselves to be female and they were legally recognised as female under Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act, 2015. There is zero scientific evidence to confirm that either of these two men are in fact women and therefore female. But, they are recognised as being female by a corrupt legal construct which bows down to the tyrannical gender ideology. There will never exist any scientific evidence that these two men are women, because it is impossible for a man to become a woman or for a woman to become a man. So why are they legally recognised as being something that is impossible and imprisoned with women prisoners?
We should sympathise with those who suffer from gender dysphoria, however, to co-operate and to reinforce their delusion by legal means is a form of insanity. It cannot be of any real help in the long run because it denies the reality of our existence. If you stand against this ideology or refuse to go along with it, you could end up in prison alongside Enoch Burke.
I have heard Catholics say that Enoch Burke should have handled his case differently and that he could have avoided jail, and I am sure that this is true. But at what cost? This would be to ignore the problem of the mainstream gender narrative. Ultimately, Enoch Burke is not in prison for refusing to obey a court order. He is in prison because he refuses to bow down to the tyrannical pressure that was brought to bear on him. He is a modern day John the Baptist.
John the Baptist could have avoided being put in prison and he could have avoided being beheading by simply remaining quiet in the face of the great evil of his time, whereby Herod was committing public adultery. We should never belittle the consequences of such evil behaviour as Herod’s.
King Henry VIII wasn’t happy with his first wife because she could not bear him a male heir. He decided to seek to have the marriage declared invalid, but Pope Clement VII upheld the validity of the marriage. King Henry VIII, broke away from the Catholic Church and founded the Church of England with himself as head. He then began to persecute the Catholic Church in England and suppressed the monastic and religious orders. In time this spread to Ireland and the persecution was continued on by Queen Elizabeth I.
The penal laws in Ireland, which led to persecution and martyrdom, came about as a direct result of Henry VIII divorcing his wife and entering into several adulterous relationships. We should never underestimate the consequences of sinful behaviour. But allied to Henry VIII’s divorce, and as much a cause of the persecutions if not more so, is the fact that so few were willing to stand up to Henry VIII’s evil behaviour. Their silence is what allowed the terror to spread. Saint Thomas More and Saint John Fisher were executed for their resistance as were other brave souls who were not afraid to publicly oppose evil.
Minority positions are being upheld because so few dare to speak out against the collective insanity of those who seek to destroy the family by any means possible. This silence further endangers the brave souls who are willing to speak out publicly. It is easy to deal with a small group who are willingly to public defy corrupt civil authority and to call it out. But unless a large group are willing to come together and to publicly stand up against the tyranny, then the tyranny will prevail. We see this happening in Ireland as I write.
We are living in the midst of the collapse of our Irish civilisation, but not enough people are willing to publicly call out what is happening. As Dostoyevsky says in the above story.
“Man loves to see the downfall and disgrace of the righteous”
Many deny the reality of what is going on so that they can continue to live their comfortable lives. But the end will come, and all will suffer on account of silence in the face of tyranny.
Jesus Christ tells us, “He that is not with me, is against me: and he that gathers not with me, scatters.” (Matthew 12:30)
St Paul speaks about the unity of the body being composed of many members in his first letter to the Corinthians and warns of the dangers of schism in the body.
“That there might be no schism in the body; but the members might be mutually careful one for another.
And if one member suffer any thing, all the members suffer with it; or if one member glory, all the members rejoice with it.” (1 Corinthians 12:25-26)
As Fr Zossima’s brother Markel said to his mother:
“Mother, my little heart, in truth we are each responsible to all for all, it's only that men don't know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once.”
Our own actions have consequences that affect the whole of mankind for good or for ill.
Let us determine to follow Jesus Christ – the way, the truth, and the life.
May God bless you
John