Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Author, Philosopher, Hero

When I was early in my teens my reading habits began change. I began moving away from the science fiction and fantasy literature that had occupied my imagination and furnished the many mansions oof my dreams.

Just when I was beginning to lift my face from the acid washed pages of my comic book worlds, I looked past the American authors they were teaching in school…Lewis, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, I looked past Kerouac, Salinger, Vonnegut and Bratigan, I looked past them and found Dostoyevsky resting on the shelf…through his pages a whole new dimension of literature opened up for me.

Dostoyevsky lived and wrote at the crossroads where literature becomes philosophy; he exposed the human condition at that juncture, our raw nature, its powers and its frailties, he showed it to us in the possessed and the guilty, in the pure hearted idiots who are able to survive only because they are loved.

He was a novelist, and through him I came to understand the power that narrative has to convey certain truths that touch all human beings. There are no authors more adept at this function than the Russians, with Fyodor Dostoyevsky being the foremost practitioner.

His influence on me was profound.

From Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground, to The Idiot and the Brothers Karamozov, I spent years reading the body of his work, from my mid-teens through my twenties and into my thirties. I tracked down his cannon until all that was left were translations of his notebooks…which I read.

I purchased the notebook for A Raw Youth at a bookstore in Minneapolis (Majors and Quinn). I was in the Navy at the time, but home on leave, my friend Lucy was with me. 

In those pages I could see the way Dostoyevsky constructed the arc of his narrative, how he developed his characters from ego to id, from false-self to true-self, from privilege to despair and back again...as if he were describing the movements of the soul.

 The book was used and I was delighted to find an imperial ruble tucked into its pages, overlooked, a bookmark left to me by whoever was last to read to it.

 I discovered in Dostoyevsky the founder of existentialist philosophy, and through him I learned to admire Charles Dickens, whom Dostoyevsky considered to be the greatest author of all time.

 It has been one hundred and forty-four years since Dostoyevsky went into the dirt. His influence has not waned, I think because human beings have not changed, and his insight into the dilemma of existence remains sound…it is well suited to the digital age.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien – Author, Poet, Her

I learned how to read novels by reading J. R. R. Tolkien.

My mother had a beautiful edition of The Hobbit on one of our many bookshelves. It was the hardbound edition, that came in a green, it was embossed with gold leaf and had gilt pages. There were lovely illustrations inside, with maps drawn by the author himself.

I pulled it off the shelf and read it when I was in the third grade; when I was finished I began reading it again, and I also The Lord of the Rings, followed by the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales that had been edited and published by his son Christopher after his death. I read these volumes many times over: eight, nine, ten times over…into my early thirties.

Reading and re-reading Tolkien put the idea in my head that I wanted to be a writer. Reading his work over and over again gave me a deep appreciation for the care and craft he put into the construction of his fantasy world.

I remember a sensation I had on my third time through the Silmarillion; I believe I was in the seventh grade at that time. My comprehensive reading list had expanded considerably by that time, to include more than fantasy and science fiction; I read other literary classics, poetry, history and mythology as well as scripture. In addition to these I had begun to read reference materials related to Middle Earth, and through those readings I experienced a heightened sense of understanding of the story being narrated; my vocabulary had expanded and I had become a better reader, making it so that I was able to comprehend more of the material I was engaged with. The picture was filling; I was able to grasp more of the world that Tolkien had created; it was coming to life for me in new and different…more fulsome way.

I even read a biography of the great man himself, which was probably the first piece of non-fiction I ever read (other than histories that had been so mythologized that they felt like fiction).

I found the reference materials compiled by other authors about Tolkien and Middle Earth to be fascinating: The Tolkien Companion, the New Tolkien Companion, along with various encyclopedias, bestiaries and anthologies depicting the arms and armor of this fantasy world.

I added his smaller—lesser known works to the corpus of material I consumed. While still in the seventh grade I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which resonated with my another of my reading interests, Arthurian Lore, and through Tolkien’s Beowulf, I was introduced in a literary way to the Viking sagas.

Through Tolkien I came to have an early appreciation for the power of myth, as well as their malleability, and the potential we have as creative beings to fashion our own myths and communicate them to the broader world.

Through his writing Tolkien dramatized the basic conflicts he saw at work in our civilization, conflicts between the bucolic and pastoral life (which is where his heart was), with the forces of industry that seemed to be destroying the planet (even in his day he saw this happening), as well as the disasters of modern warfare and the suffering they visit on the world, which he experienced first-hand while serving as a signal man in World War I.

In my opinion the collected stories of Middle Earth do what all great literature does, they represent a social critique in the twentieth century more relevant to the human race ever.

We would be wise to be mindful of it.

 

The Feast of Saint Leonidas, Father of Origen

Little is known about the Christian Martyr Saint Leonidas, except that he was beheaded by the Egyptian prefect, a man named Lactus, in 202 CE, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus.

We might encounter his name in his list of martyrs from that period of persecution, but not much more would have been said about him because Leonidas did not lead a noteworthy life except for the fact that he was father to one of the greatest and most well-known philosophers and theologians of the late second century…the redoubtable Origen, who in the Orthodox tradition is a regarded as a saint and counted among the mothers and fathers of the church, while among the Catholics and for the rest of the Western Church he is a controversial figure.

The controversy surrounding Origen arises  from the fact that his writings were formerly condemned during the reign of the Emperor Justinian, at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 CE, nearly three hundred years after his death, and though he himself was not officially anathematized, all of his work was.

It was three centuries after Origen’s death, two centuries after the church had become the official religion of the Roman Empire, as the church was on its way to becoming the only sanctioned religion whose practice was permissible in the West. It was then, just as Origin’s contribution to Christian philosophy was being condemned that the Roman Catholic Church took a turn for the worse, the so-called Dark Ages ensued, and the Empire began to crumble.

Remarkably, Origen’s work remained influential. His thought continued to guide the thinking of theologians for centuries and continues to influence us in the twenty-first century.

And yet Origen is not a Catholic Saint; we do not celebrate his feast. We celebrate the feast of his father instead, giving thanks to Origin through Leonidas, for his great work.

Origen ran afoul of the church on account of his doctrine of apocatastasis, which taught, in keeping with scripture[1], that all things and beings emanate from the divine, and according to the doctrine of apocatastasis, would ultimately return to the source of its being (God) in the great reunification and reconciliation of the divine with creation.  It is the furthest and most logical extension of Christian hope that has ever been penned…according to the doctrine of apocatastasis even the devil and his angels would be reconciled with God in the end.

In the early sixth century Origen’s cosmology was perceived as being a threat to the Imperial religion, and to the increasingly popular theology of Saint Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 CE) who taught that the material universe was created ex nihilo (an absurdity)…out of nothing, thus obviating the argument for the return of the created order, including all things and being, to its divine source.  

Augustine’s theology while inherently dualistic, insofar as it describes the material order as beginning in nothingness (to be understood as a privation of the good and the material essence of evil), and allows for its continuation into eternity. In the Augustinian scheme evil continues, it is rooted in a pre-temporal reality and its scope has no limit. Furthermore, the entire system of sacramental theology that has been operative in the church since the sixth century is dependent on this absurdity.

Justinian and those who voted to condemn Origen’s work and the Second Council of Constantinople, understood that the doctrine of apocatastasis implies a theology of universal salvation. They understood how this soteriology challenges the authority of priests and bishops, and the church itself as intermediary between God and humanity. This threat to Augustine’s sacramental theology, because it undermined the authority of the church, it also undermined the authority of the first Christian Emperor. It was on these grounds and on the basis of these political considerations that Origen’s work was condemned. It was an act of unadulterated hubris on the part of the Church.

Even though Origen’s teaching caused him to fall out of favor with the hierarchy, the man himself was incredibly popular, he was among the most widely read theologians of the patristic era, his theology was seminal to that of many other theologians and philosophers, including those who penned the Nicene Creed. Origen himself could not be anathematized, but his doctrine was seen as dangerous, deemed heretical and among Catholics it was set aside.

Origen saw the doctrine of apocatastasis as the logical conclusion of the basic faith commitments held by all Christians in his time.

He was right.

These basic faith commitments are also held by most Christians today, representing a shared tradition of belief concerning the nature reality and the purpose of existence that we have never wavered from. Origen was not attempting to teach something radical or new, he was expostulating the faith he had received from his teacher Clement of Alexandria, another giant among the Ante-Nicene mothers and fathers.

Origen followed in his father’s footsteps, going to a martyr’s death c. 252 – 254 CE, his time came during the persecutions of the Roman Emperor Decius; at the age of 69 he was imprisoned, tortured and died from his injuries.

He was a philosopher and a theologian of great repute, martyred twice: first by the Roman Empire and then by the Imperial Roman Church, tortured by the former, and intellectually assassinated by the later…and he lives on.

---

[1] See the introduction to John’s Gospel