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Taking Captive Every Thought: Book Review
Notes from the Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Reviewed by Cameron Riviere
Are people basically good, or basically evil? Can the evils that beset society be cured by education, or social organization—in a word, by progress? Or are they the result of fundamental wickedness in the human heart, incurable except by divine intervention?
Russia in the 1860’s had at least one thing in common with modern America: society was rife with Enlightenment theories that moral values could be established without God, and that evil could be cured through education, because people would stop doing bad things if only they understood that doing good was in their own best interest. Then, as now, the Bible taught otherwise: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9, NASB). But who would defend this truth against the cultural elite?
The answer, believe it or not, was a writer of fiction. In his 1864 novella, Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky powerfully illustrated this biblical truth, and refuted its opposite. In the book, a fictional diarist writes of the hidden motives behind man’s actions. In the first of the book’s two chapters, his reflection on the perversity of his own motivations turns into a withering critique of the theory that education can put a stop to man’s evil deeds:
“Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has…man…acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously…understanding their real interests, have…rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled…by nobody and by nothing, but…have obstinately, wilfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness?”
Indeed,
“at all times, [man] has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated....One's own free unfettered choice,…however wild it may be…is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked…. how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice?…. What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.”
In the second chapter, he describes an incident in his own life, illustrating his deceitfulness, not just toward others, but even toward himself. There is no getting to the bottom of his own motives—even supposedly benevolent acts he later sees he has done for wicked, prideful reasons. In both argument and narrative, he expresses the awful truth: he has a heart depraved beyond measure--and so do all human beings.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a thinking Christian, and therefore a man at war with his times. He was used by God to speak the gospel to his culture—and, in the process, wrote some of the greatest novels ever written. They can speak to us today as well, if we will read them. Notes from the Underground is an excellent (and brief!) introduction to his work.
© 2000 Cameron Riviere
Taking Captive Every Thought [1] [2] [3] [4] // Book Reviews