My Soul Did Long To Be There
Yesterday I finished reading the book The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The title is an allusion to the devils that the Savior cast out of the man in the country of the Gadarenes and sent into a herd of swine (see Luke 8:26-36). The story is a tragedy and shows where the philosophy of nihilism—the rejection of any real meaning in life—leads. At one point in the novel one of the main characters, Stepan Trofimovitch, gave voice, I believe, to Dostoevsky’s feelings in the face of Russian nihilism when he said to a large crowd, “The enthusiasm of the youth of today is as pure and bright as in our age. All that has happened is a change of aim, the replacing of one beauty by another! The whole difficulty lies in the question which is more beautiful, Shakespeare or boots, Raphael or petroleum?... I maintain that Shakespeare and Raphael are more precious than the emancipation of the serfs, more precious than Nationalism, more precious than Socialism, more precious than the young generation,...