Hallelujah. Praise the Lord.

In Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky Lev Shestov identifies the ability to sincerely say this word as the difference between ataraxia and despair. Nietzsche, Shestov recalls, said “God is dead”; Tolstoy said “God is the good”; both, he concludes, mean the same thing. In other words, if God is not the personal Being that made the universe, the earth, all that fills it, and stamped man with the imago Dei, then he’s not God. God cannot be Tolstoy’s misappropriation of a Platonic form. To say that is to say that God is an ideal, and as far as those go—what are they if they are not characteristics of God that emanate from his person? The work of Nietzsche suffices to assure us: they are nothing. Such an idea—that God is the good—might lead you to think that you could achieve moral perfection on your own—which is what Tolstoy tried and failed to do. It might also be the sort of idea that motivates you to rewrite the Gospel without any of its supernatural elements, like miracles and resurrections and whatnot—Jesus was divine like Buddha was, only more so, but he wasn’t the Son of God—that kind of thing.

Tolstoy said Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal, and Nietzsche surely would have resented Tolstoy’s clamoring for universals. But both, Shestov says, failed to achieve ataraxia and instead succumbed to despair. I suppose it proves nothing, but Nietzsche went insane and spent the last ten years of his life in bed in a vegetative state. As an old man, Tolstoy fled the strife of his home, contracted pneumonia, and died in a stationmaster’s house.

Dostoevsky, Shestov argues, achieved ataraxia. This is what the Stoic philosophers were after in their resignation and virtue: it means something like imperturbability. However, in linking ataraxia to the ability to say hallelujah, praise the Lord, Shestov distinguishes it from the Stoic conception.

No human life is without suffering, but these three men each suffered exceptionally in their own way: sensitive, they suffered great loss, physical sickness, and the cold breath of despair. Tolstoy, though rich, grew up without his parents. Nietzsche suffered from a terrible disease (probably syphilis). Dostoevsky was an epileptic, spent four years in Siberian jail, and lost a young son. To some extent, I agree with the Tolstoy of War and Peace that suffering is relative—though that statement, if always true, is stunningly flat in the face of the deprivation of basic human needs and desires (family, community, food, shelter, clothing, etc.). I say that to add—that though Dostoevsky arguably experienced the most pain and the worst catastrophes, he didn’t necessarily suffer more than the other two. (Many, I suspect, would find it hard to sympathize with Count Tolstoy, who was rich—and maybe even with Nietzsche, who may have brought his sickness on himself. Although, you could also blame Dostoevsky for his time in Siberia, depending on your evaluation of Czarism and revolutionary politics).

Whoever suffered more, it is interesting that Dostoevsky, as troubled and melancholy as the other two, ended with ataraxia. Apparently, St. Paul uses the root for this Greek word when he says, “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am” (Philippians 4:11). To extrapolate from the circumstances of material need or want of Paul’s context, this applies to Dostoevsky in spiritual and philosophical terms. The real problem each of these men faced was the meaninglessness of all things and the predominance of injustice, suffering, and death in all human experience (though Nietzsche didn’t care much about “injustice”). These are the circumstances of life on the earth. There may be grace and goodness in places for certain people—but entropy and death ultimately swallows it all, and in most cases, that grace and goodness was purchased by violence and injustice.

When Shestov says that Dostoevsky was finally able to say “hallelujah” and thereby achieved ataraxia, he means that he found faith that gave him hope for the redemptive conclusion of the narrative of the world. No matter what happened, it was God’s world for Dostoevsky, and His will would be done. Some see this as a despicable exemption made possible by self-deception and material prosperity. And indeed, by the end of his life, Dostoevsky had emerged from his hardships as an indebted writer, a gambling addict, and the survivor of a failed marriage, into financial security, a happy marriage, and, apparently, self-restraint from the roulette table. Was it dumb complacency or the fruit of the struggle to conform the soul to objective reality? Or was it merely the stupid, pragmatic effects of successfully convincing yourself of a consoling construction?

Somewhere, I heard Dostoevsky’s writing described as Romantic Realism, the contradiction of which was lost on me at the time. I understand now. His novels depict with brutal honesty the reality of pain, injustice, poverty, sickness, death, and meaninglessness. You could say the same for Tolstoy, but what you get more of in Dostoevsky is what accounts for the “romantic” in the genre I’m discussing: instances wherein his characters say, in their own way, “hallelujah.” Andrei and Pierre in War and Peace have similar experiences, and Levin at the end of Anna Karenina seems to find something like it, but in Dostoevsky you have men falling to the ground and kissing it out of love for humanity and faith in God—Zossima, Alyosha, the Ridiculous Man, Raskolnikov, and Shatov (I think each of those characters actually falls on his face and kisses the ground). There’s also Stepan Trofimovich in Devils, who, if he doesn’t kiss the ground, only fails to do so because he is bed-ridden (the circumstances of whose death bear uncanny resemblance to the Tolstoy’s). The “Romantic” aspect of this genre unavoidably refers to the style—effusive sentences and extravagant emotional experiences—but it also has to do with what is characteristic in Romance—hope and the experience of knowing and loving something beyond the self.

Dostoevsky found in Christ, his life, death, and resurrection (the part Tolstoy left out) the means by which to look at reality on earth and the portions of God’s metanarrative before him and behind him and to ultimately say “hallelujah,” praise the Lord.

Read the Bible and see that it speaks to the problems these men faced: suffering in Job, meaninglessness in Ecclesiastes. Read the chronicles of violence and injustice in the Old Testament—witness the kindness and cruelty of God’s chosen people and also of their enemies. And then see the Bible’s simultaneous message, announced throughout the Old Testament (from Genesis 3 to Malachi 4), revealed and realized in the New Testament—that God loves humanity in spite of its evil, that meaningless and evil are symptoms of our alienation from Him, and that God himself, in the person of Christ, came to earth, took on flesh, lived perfectly, and bore all the penalty of our sin on Himself, and then rose from the dead to secure his victory and ensure the final consummation of grace and goodness. If you can believe it, you might be able, with Dostoevsky and a host of others, to heed the essence of this Psalm:

 

Praise the Lord!

Praise God in His sanctuary;

Praise him in His mighty expanse.

Praise Him for His mighty deeds;

Praise him according to His excellent greatness.

 

Praise Him with trumpet sound;

Praise Him with harp and lyre.

Praise him with timbrel and dancing;

Praise Him stringed instruments and pipe.

Praise Him with loud cymbals;

Praise Him with resounding cymbals.

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord!