memories...

I was just going through some of last semester’s college pics. Wow, we’ve had some good times! I don’t really like posting them on my blog, so, instead, I’ve added them to my flikr page. If you’re interested then you can go and see them there: flikr.

Merry Christmas!

snow in Minnesota
Originally uploaded by aesthetic realist.

Wow, another one down with success. Between the Mall of America, Sam's Club, and REI, I did all my Christmas shopping in one day this year (a success story for which I am proud). Again, I've noticed how complicated the life of a poor college student can be... For my family, Christmas is always filled with countless traditions and large family gatherings. After getting out of bed this morning, we (my brothers and sisters and I) quickly dug through the thirteen stockings that had been filled the night before. By 8:30, we were all out the door and on the way to our grandparent's house. After arriving, we (older cousins, brothers and sisters) all settled down around a table with coffee and breakfast cakes. Goodness, I sure have been out of touch! College, world travels, homemaking, and life in general is always moving on (whether I know it or not). It was fun catching up with everyone. The day was filled with ice skating, hiking in the snow, opening gifts, long conversations, relaxing in the steam room (and running outside in the snow, in our swim suits, like wild...), good games of ping pong (I lost to both of my brothers), table games, sitting in front of the fire, and eating. The food was awesome! After eating all the glazed hams, colorful salads, creamed potatoes, and countless deserts, I will definitely be using the treadmill tomorrow. Major points go to my aunts, mother, grandma and grandpa, and dangerously eligible sisters and cousins. Y'all are amazing! There is NO place like home.

After countless parties and many festivities still to come, it seems proper to end this blog in a possibly offensive fashion. But, in my mind, it would be of much greater offense if I were to restrain from doing such. So, if you have a problem, then you can go ahead and get over it...

"Every warrior's boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever." - Isaiah

Prufrock

Crime and Punishment: The Synderesis of a Degenerate Conscience

Few writers have portrayed man’s suppression of conscience with the level of intimacy and vividness that Dostoevsky achieves. In Crime and Punishment, he takes his readers into the darkest recesses of the degenerate and criminal mind. Through the character of Raskolnikov, moral intellect is portrayed on both levels of the older natural laws: conscientia and synderesis. While able to blur, twist, or mistake the conscientia (surface conscience), there is yet a deeper conscience (synderesis) that man cannot completely ignore. Such is the case with Raskolnikov. This paper will illustrate how Raskolnikov employs perverted forms of confession, justification, and atonement in the attempt to appease his deeper conscience. Through the pangs of his conscience, Raskolnikov spirals into further stupidity, wickedness, and guilt, until he is so stretched and broken that he has nowhere to turn. Finally, it is also through his conscience that Raskolnikov finds pure justification, confession, atonement, and ultimately salvation.

What filthy things my heart is capable of.
Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loathsome![i]

As is common with men who have rejected community and its ensuing accountabilities, Raskolnikov is filled with inner questioning, contempt, and fear. He muses, “It would be interesting to know what men are most afraid of.”[ii] At this point in the plot, the thing that Raskolnikov most fears is nothing more than a terrible idea plaguing his mind. Like Nietzsche, he sees the common man as something to be surpassed. Ethics and cultural mores are mere hindrances, and Raskolnikov would like to believe that he is the sort of person with the ability to supersede them. Dostoevsky describes Raskolnikov’s long and feverish thought process, “Long, long ago his present anguish had its first beginnings; it had waxed and gathered strength, it had matured and concentrated, until it had taken the form of a fearful, frenzied and fantastic question, which tortured his heart and his mind, clamoring insistently for an answer.”[iii] Consumed with a sense of nihilistic inevitability, Raskolnikov devises a test of his conscience. In desperation, he plans a perfect crime – the murder of a seemingly useless and insignificant pawnbroker. He meticulously plots out every detail, questioning himself the whole way. Even when the fated day presents itself, he identifies everything as “simply an attempt at an experiment” and “far from being the real thing.”[iv] He is confused, delirious, and plagued with self doubt, but “When reason fails, the devil helps.”[v] Dostoevsky describes, in sickening detail, the blunt axe, the shattered skull, the gushing blood, the contorted face. Raskolnikov kills both the pawnbroker and her sister. While the murder is completed relatively flawlessly, the story is far from over for Raskolnikov.

‘Damn it all!’ he thought suddenly, in a fit of ungovernable fury.
It has begun, then, it has begun. Hang the new life! Good Lord, how stupid it is![vi]

J. Budziszewski describes the two ancient aspects of moral intellect in his book, What We Can’t Not Know. It is fascinating to discover the many profound parallels between his philosophical descriptions and Dostoevsky’s fictional portrayal of Raskolnikov. Budziszewski describes the conscientia (surface conscience) as a suppressible entity; it can be erased, it can be mistaken, and it can differ from one individual to the next.[vii] If he has learned nothing else since leaving home, Raskolnikov has certainly mastered the suppression of his conscientia. It is only through his mother’s letter that we have any real hint of a Christian upbringing in his past. She questions him on the state of his spiritual life and whether he still believes in God’s mercy and grace, writing, “I am afraid in my heart that you may have been visited by the new spirit of infidelity that is abroad to-day.”[viii] As he finishes reading the letter, it is clear that his mother’s fears are not unrealistic, “when he finished it, his face was pale and distorted and a bitter, wrathful and malignant smile was on his lips.”[ix] Whether through experiencing an impoverished life in the slums of St. Petersburg, a twisted education at the university, or a stunning realization of depravity and wickedness, Raskolnikov has lost his innocence. Whatever the reason, it is with a seared conscience that he asks Sonya what God has ever done for her, suggesting, “But, perhaps there is no God at all.”[x] After charitably leaving his money on the window at Marmeladov’s house, he suppresses his conscience, saying, “What a stupid thing I’ve done.”[xi] After hindering a man that is trying to take advantage of a helpless woman, he suppresses his conscience, saying, “Let them devour each other alive – what is it to me?”[xii] While considering the murder, he suppresses his conscience, saying that it is only a test, and after all, she is “a stupid, senseless, worthless, spiteful, ailing, horrid old woman.”[xiii] Right up to the point of the murder he erases, mistakes, confuses, and ignores his moral intellect. Yet underneath all of his rationalizing lays a growing confusion that must be dealt with. It is only after committing the murder that Raskolnikov’s life finally spirals into confusion. He has come against something that cannot be erased, mistaken, or suppressed; the infallibility of his deep conscience.

If I am so scared now, what would it be like if it somehow came to pass that I were really going to do it?[xiv]

Synderesis, or deep conscience, is an infallible and universal knowledge of the foundational principles of moral law. Budziszewski appropriately argues, “Deep conscience is the reason why even a man who tells himself there is no right and wrong may shrink from committing a murder.”[xv] The murderer may or may not feel pangs of remorse, but even if he is able to suppress his remorse, he will show other signs of guilty knowledge. He goes on to explain, “We sometimes imagine that to lack guilty feelings is to lack a conscience, but deep conscience is knowledge, not feelings, and guilty knowledge darkly asserts itself regardless of the state of the feelings.”[xvi] It is with good reason that Raskolnikov fears the sort of mindset that will follow his murder of the pawnbroker. After completing the act, he completely looses his head, submits more and more to the mastery of fear, longs to run, and looses all power of reflection.[xvii] It is in this way that Raskolnikov sinks into delirium and finally looses consciousness. For so long he has suppressed, ignored, and distorted conscience and morality that now, after this final and culminating act of disregard, he begins to realize the painful knowledge of his deep conscience. Raskolnikov’s guilty knowledge begins to assert itself in a striking mirror of Budziszewski’s description.

Have you seen a butterfly round a candle?
That’s how he will keep circling and circling round me.[xviii]

Porfiry Petrovitch describes the criminal mind, saying, “It’s not merely that he has nowhere to run to, he is psychologically unable to escape…Through a law of nature he can’t escape me if he had anywhere to go.”[xix] Raskolnikov has no great fear for the legal consequences of his crime. In contrast, his fear lies in his inner moral condemnation. Budziszewski suggests that the conscience works in two different modes. “In the cautionary mode, it alerts us to the peril of moral wrong and generates an inhibition against committing it. In the accusatory mode, it indicts us for the wrong we have already done.”[xx] As we have seen, Raskolnikov’s cautionary mode of fear and questioning has ended; he has ignored and suppressed all moral inhibitions. Now that he has murdered, his life is accordingly plagued by an avenging conscience. Through justification, confession, and atonement, he runs himself in circles trying to appease his conscience. The problem is that he doesn’t flee from the wrong; instead, he has suppressed the idea that it was wrong, and he instead flees from thinking about the wrong.

While battered by his inner moral demands, Raskolnikov attempts to appease his deep conscience through justification. Before the murder, we read very little of his rationalization. Raskolnikov is more occupied with quelling his fear and accepting his fate. After the murder his interests switch focus, and he feels compelled to justify his actions to almost everybody. For example, while speaking with Porifry and Razumihin, Raskolnikov explains his philosophy and reasoning behind the murder. He explains that men are divided into two classes; the ordinary and the extraordinary. Ordinary men must live in submission to laws and conscience, while extraordinary men have an inner right to transgress laws and conscience when necessary. Porfiry suggests that Raskolnikov, as a result of believing these things, must believe that he is an extraordinary person. Raskolnikov quickly denies these charges, lying that he doesn’t believe himself to be such a person. Over and over again, Raskolnikov justifies himself to friends, acquaintances, family, himself, and finally to Sonya. Wanting to relate to her, he says, “Haven’t you done the same? You, too, have transgressed…have had the strength to transgress. You have laid hands on yourself, you have destroyed a life…your own.”[xxi] Raskolnikov desperately wants Sonya to understand and relate to him. As he is weighed down by guilt, he naturally wants somebody else to share in his burden.

Budziszewski quotes Dostoevsky saying: “Legal punishment inflicted for a crime intimidates a criminal infinitely less than the lawmakers think, partly because he himself morally demands it.”[xxii] It is all that Raskolnikov can do to keep from confessing his crime. His mind is so completely filled with the weight of synderesis that he is very anxious to relieve himself. When drinking with Zametov, he begins to confess, then decides against it, explains what he is reading about, and makes many mysterious inferences to his crime. Raskolnikov has ‘an intense desire again “to put his tongue out. Shivers keep running up and down his spine.” Finally, he blurts out “And what if it was I who murdered the old women and Lizaveta?” [xxiii] There are countless times throughout the story when he makes random inferences to his crime and comes close to giving himself up. At one point he finally succumbs to his need for confession in a cryptic statement to Sonya: “If I come tomorrow, I’ll tell you who killed Lizaveta.”[xxiv] The next day he tells Sonya of his murder. The problem with Raskolnikov’s confession is that it is not done out of repentance. Raskolnikov naturally and selfishly wants somebody else to share in his inner sense of guilt.

The third and final demonstration of his guilty knowledge is his attempt at atonement. Raskolnikov has acquired a debt to his conscience in committing the crime; a debt that must somehow be paid. Budziszewski explains, “If we deny the debt, the knowledge works in us anyway, and we pay pain after pain, price after price, in a cycle which has no end because we refuse to pay the one price demanded.”[xxv] In contrast with his uncaring contempt before the murder, Raskolnikov has now acquired a random obligation to charity and benevolence. For example, he takes commendable responsibility for Marmeladov’s family after Marmeladov is killed under the carriage. He feels extreme elation after his first good deed, saying, “I’ve done with fancies, imaginary terrors and phantoms! Life is real! Haven’t I lived just now? My life has not yet died with that old woman!”[xxvi] For the first time Raskolnikov feels excited about life, and yet his excitement is very short lived. He makes atonement through denying himself food, education, and proper lodgings. He imagines that he would have been able to do great things with the money that he stole after the crime. Over and over again, Raskolnikov tries to appease his conscience through false atonement. Many times he comes close to true repentance, but he always retreats back to his old prideful self, saying, “I shall make a struggle for it and they won’t do anything to me.”[xxvii]

Stand at the cross-roads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, ‘I am a murderer!’ Then God will send you life again.[xxviii]

Raskolnikov has failed to appease his conscience through justification, relieve his conscience through confession, or satisfy his conscience through atonement. Each of these seeming virtues only served to further confuse and distort his moral nature. In the end, Raskolnikov is so burdened with guilt, stripped of pride, and convinced of his wickedness, that he finally begins the process of repentance. Worn with fatigue, torn, dirty, and soaked with the night’s rain, Raskolnikov finally reaches a decision. He still questions, “I dared to believe in myself, to dream of what I would do! I am a beggarly contemptible wretch, contemptible!”[xxix] As he is going to make his confession, he remembers Sonya’s words, and in the middle of the cross-roads, Raskolnikov bows down twice and kisses the filthy earth, in a symbolic act of repentance. He afterwards confesses in front of Ilya Petrovitch, saying, “It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.”[xxx] After a long trial, he receives his sentence, and is sent to prison in Siberia. On the last page, Raskolnikov lies peacefully in bed, holding a New Testament, and thinking about Sonya. He wonders, “Can her convictions not be mine now? Her feelings, her aspirations at least…”[xxxi] In the end, Raskolnikov finds pure justification, confession, and atonement. When he finally accepts the conviction of his deep conscience and his inability to defeat his innate moral knowledge, he obtains true peace and happiness, despite the wretchedness of his external conditions. His reconciliation of the struggle with his deep conscience has set him on the road to true salvation

“Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.”[xxxii]

strong bad

strong bad
Originally uploaded by aesthetic realist.

Hail Strong Bad. Whether you are a symbol of the sublimation of culture or the degradation of culture is a question that could be broached... But, since I don't have adequate time to decide on an answer, I will merely recognize that you are a cultural symbol.

If only you had the intelligence necessary to help me write my Western Lit. Paper, I might consider emailing you. Since you don't, I will simply refer my readers to the proof of your inadequacy: Strong Bad Paper.

procrastinating... ;-)

Better than Oprah

This was actually a pretty tricky list to compile. After some literate deliberation, I have attached my top eight pieces of fiction. Philosophy, theology, history, poetry, and ancient classics will all be saved for another post. If there are any books on the following list that you have not read, then you have deprived yourself… Make restitution now. And for the rest of you out in blogosphere, follow the crowd; publish your favorite book lists.

The Brothers Karamazov: Fyodor Dostoevsky
“I've sworn to amend, and every day I've done the same filthy things. I understand now that such men as I need a blow, a blow of destiny to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! but the thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame; I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified. Perhaps I shall be purified, gentlemen?"
Crime and Punishment: Fyodor Dostoevsky
“He judged himself severely, and his hardened conscience found no especially terrible guilt in his past, except perhaps a simple blunder, which could happen to anyone. He was ashamed precisely because he, Raskolnikov, had perished so blindly, hopelessly, dumbly and stupidly.”
The Chosen: Chaim Potok
‘“There’s more truth to that than you realize,” he murmured. “You can listen to silence, Reuven. I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.”’
The Lord of the Rings: J.R.R. Tolkien
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost.”
Cry the Beloved Country: Alan Paton
"Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers…for fear will rob him of all if he gives too much."
The Picture of Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde
“To get back to my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. Youth! There is nothing like it. It’s absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen to with any respect are much younger than my-self. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her greatest wonder.”
Song of Albion: Stephen Lawhead
"My dear fellow, that's exactly what it is. You see, the thieving blighters know they have you - you’re trapped here on the motorway. You can't simply stroll along to the competitor next door. You're tired, need respite from the road. They put up this facade and pretend to offer you succor and sustenance. But it's a lie. They offer swill and offal, and we have to take it. They know we won't say anything. We're English! We don't like to make a fuss. We take whatever we're given, because, really, we don't deserve any better."
To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee
"There is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is the court."