God and Culture . . .

GOD SPEAKS THROUGH GREAT LITERATURE

The other day I was discussing Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor”, a selection from his Brothers Karamazov with a group of college students, and the question came up as to what constitutes great literature. I had pointed out that Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest of all the modern novelists, and that Brothers Karamazov was his greatest novel, and that “The Grand Inquisitor” was its greatest chapter. It required little logic for them to conclude that I was saying that the several pages before us were perhaps the greatest piece of literature produced in modern times. The question was therefore appropriate: What makes great literature?

I pointed out that for literature to become great, a classic, it must transcend the time and place that produced it. To be great Dostoevsky can not be Russian nor a man of the 1800’s; he must be universal and his message must speak to men of all ages. Great literature is language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. Insofar as we know, Homer only wrote. He never was a king or a general, nor did he ever found a city. He only wrote and yet a civilization was built on him. Homer still lives, still speaks, and like the pyramids, he defies time. This is great literature. It nurtures the mind and challenges it to excellence. It incites humanity to continue living by coming to terms with man’s most basic problems. Great literature always in some way deals with the human predicament.

We are saying in this essay that God uses the great men of letters in his pursuit of sinful man. They are in a sense inspired. They have somehow tapped the deeper springs of wisdom, and we, by reading them, are brought closer to God. God is the author of all truth, whether it reaches us by way of Shakespeare or the Buddha. He teaches some of us by way of the stage, others of us by way of the athletic field, and surely he intends to reach all of us through the good literature we read.

In “The Grand Inquisitor” Dostoevsky lays before the reader a choice between two kinds of freedom. One is found in the established church that grants security and salvation for loyalty and obedience; the other is found in Jesus Christ and offers no worldly rewards. In the story the cardinal, who has used the Inquisition to bend men to his will and is thus “The Grand Inquisitor”, has an encounter with Jesus, who has returned to earth and is held prisoner by the cardinal for doing acts of mercy in the streets of his city. The cardinal is angry because Jesus is a disturbing influence to his system, and he wants him to go away and never return again. But in some twelve pages of monologue (Jesus never speaks) the cardinal states his case to Jesus, arguing that the freedom provided by the church is far better than the freedom offered by Jesus.

The words Dostoevsky puts into the cardinal’s mouth provide keen insights into human nature and show the grave difficulty of being a free man in Christ in the face of organized religion. The cardinal says to Jesus: “Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?” Recognizing that Jesus wanted his followers to reject the rigidity of the ancient law and with “free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image as a guide,” he went on to say: “But didst Thou not know that he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice.”

The cardinal assures Jesus that the freedom the church offers will bring the people happiness, just as dumb driven cattle are contented. The church even permits them to sin, and their leisure hours are “like a child’s game” in that nothing significant is required of them. By way of miracle, mystery and authority the cardinal’s system holds the people captive. As he says to Jesus: “Who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands?”

Dostoevsky realized that the church’s control of a man’s livelihood was too strong for most men, and for the church to control his conscience as well is too much. So the cardinal’s power seemed greater than that of Jesus. He had the money, power, and reputation. He had the authority of a great institution behind him, one that controlled men’s eternal destiny as well as their welfare in this world. Jesus had none of this apparently.

The cardinal grants that at one time the people were true disciples of Jesus, and had accepted his freedom. But he says, “We have corrected Thy work, and men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted from their heart.” The cardinal admits that the church is serving Satan, that it took the power of Rome and the sword of Caesar and “proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth.”

Dostoevsky sees the Inquisitor as a pitiful figure. He both loved and hated Jesus. Deep in his heart he longed for the freedom that only Jesus can give, but he was wedded to his system and could not turn it loose. It was a struggle between flesh and spirit, and the flesh dominated. He complains at Jesus, who never speaks: “Why hast Thou come to hinder us? And why dost Thou look silently and searchingly at me with Thy mild eyes? Be angry. I don’t want Thy love, for I love Thee not.”

But he did love Jesus. That was his problem, for he was trapped by his system, and could not accept what he most wanted.

He wanted Jesus to chastise him. Or criticize him. Or something. But Jesus never rebuked him. At last he arose and softly kissed the cardinal’s “bloodless, aged lips.” The cardinal could not stand it. He shuddered. In this moment even his legalism could not help him. He could handle hate, and being a sectarian he could deal with sectarianism. But love was too much for him. He goes to the door, opens it, and says to Jesus: “Go, and come no more . . . come not at all, never, never, never!” Jesus walks out into the darkness, leaving the cardinal with his system, with its mystery, miracle and authority.

The gentle kiss remained a glow in the cardinal’s heart, but he adhered to the security of the freedom he had chosen.

Reading in Bed

We continue to insist that a family ought to read together, not only parents to children, but parents to each other. If a man and wife can always have a book at their bedside in which they do at least a few pages of reading aloud to each other frequently, it will prove to be a great blessing. Nor should a father neglect to read to his children, and share with them the excitement that good books generate. We may never do as much as we would like, or as much as we should, but we should always be doing it.

Certainly this should include the Bible and Bible story books, but other things as well. I have been reading Tom Sawyer to my two boys, Benjy and Philip. The boys have not yet even heard of Dostoevsky, and presently it seems unlikely that he could ever in their eyes equal Mark Twain in greatness. And there is greatness in the writings of Mark Twain. He makes us laugh and cry about this strange game called life. He slips up on us and thrusts under our noses the truth about the way people are, and even while we are laughing we see ourselves in the mirror he is holding there.

But I may have selected the wrong book for Benjy, for he now has a new hero in Huck Finn. When he learned that Huck did not have to study or go either to school or church, and not even have to take baths, he marveled that anyone could have it so well.

The boys have about decided, however, that fellows like Huck and Tom, as enviable as they are, would be better off if they had parents something like they have. After all, Huck and Tom got into a peck a trouble, and it just helps sometimes for a boy to have parents around to help him over the hard places.

Ouida and I have been reading a most unusual book, one that causes us to search our souls as to whether we are sufficiently concerned about one of mankind’s most serious problems. John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me is the story of a white man, a writer, who changed himself into a Negro, and then went into the South to see what kind of life the black man really lives. His physician was able to prescribe a medication that darkened his skin somewhat, which, aided by the sun and a sunlamp and stain, made him look so much like a Negro that he was never suspected of being a white man, not even once in an experiment that stretched over many weeks.

Moreover, the transformation was so real that he began to think of himself as really a Negro. He found himself saying “We” as he talked with black people about their problems, and when he looked at himself in the mirror, he actually began to accept himself as really black, with all that means to a man living in Mississippi. Toward the end of the experiment, which found him in Montgomery, Ala., he switched from one role to the other, in a kind of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde way, in order to show the absurdity of racial discrimination. As a Negro he could not enter most restaurants, or use restrooms, or even get a drink of water; and he was continually subjected to what is called “the hate stare.” Stepping into a Negro restroom and applying cleansing cream, he turned back into a white man, and then walked the same beat to experience the vast difference that a little color can make.

The book grips you. It strips you of any illusion you might have that you understand how the Negro feels. Obviously one cannot really know what it is like to be a black man in white America without being one. Knowing this, Mr. Griffin decided to become a Negro. I have talked with some of my Negro friends about what Mr. Griffin did. They point to one big difference between the black Mr. Griffin and the real Negro: Mr. Griffin knew that he wasn’t really black, and that he could escape from his bondage at will. The real Negro has no such escape, for he will always be black and will always suffer for it.

One of my Negro friends illustrated the point by telling the story of a drunk who approached a rather homely woman and said to her, “You are the ugliest woman I ever saw!” To which the woman replied, “You are the drunkest man I ever saw!” The drunk replied, “Yes, but I’ll be sober tomorrow!”

Still Mr. Griffin’s experiences as a Negro were authentic. He worked, slept, wept, and laughed with the black folk, and he moved among the whites as a Negro. He hitchhiked across Mississippi as a Negro, catching rides with whites, who on a lonely road at night with a black man, would manifest a baseness that they would not dare reveal among whites. Some told of sleeping with Negro girls, others of wanting to, while almost all showed that they had a grossly unjust concept of the black man’s sex life. It was this view that the white man has of the Negro’s perverted sex life, along with the idea that the black man is intellectually incapable, that Mr. Griffin came to resent the most.

The reader feels for Mr. Griffin in his efforts to get something to eat, to get to a toilet, to find a decent place to rent a room. Whether he took a bus, walked down the street, applied for a job, passed near the police, or whatever, he had to remember that he was black, which meant what Mr. Griffin calls “tenth rate citizenship.”

To Ouida and me the most touching scene in the book is when he was with a Negro family in their shanty home in Mississippi. The man had offered him a place on the floor since he had no other place to stay, though with his six children it would be crowded. Mr. Griffin had previously bought a bag of Milky Ways, so after cornbread and beans they had slices of the candy, which the kids relished. One child salivated so profusely that the juicy chocolate oozed from the corner of her mouth and ran down her face. The mother removed it with a finger and put it into her own mouth. As the children prepared to go to their bunks they came one by one, all six of them, and put their arms around Mr. Griffin and softly kissed his lips.

While the others slept, Mr. Griffin arose from his cold pallet and walked out into the yard. Sitting on the stump of a tree and thinking about those sweet children, as to what the future holds for them in Mississippi where it is sinful to be black, he burst into bitter weeping.

It was indeed a unique scene. A white man turned Negro, weeping for little children as he sat alone in a black man’s back yard in rural Mississippi. There is something distinctly Christian about it.

Mr. Griffin’s experiences were in 1959. We can only hope that conditions are now somewhat improved. But the basic problem will never be really solved until the white man is willing to accept the Negro as a person, with dignity equal to his own.

Black Like Me really touched Ouida and me. I thought of Mr. Griffin when in a conversation recently with a Negro college student. He said to me, “All my life I have been told that the Negro is all right if he stays in his place.” He always wondered what that meant—in his place. He added: “Regardless of how undesirable a white man is, whether a drunkard or a thief, I have not once heard it said of a white man that “He is all right if he stays in his place.”

God is speaking to us in our culture. That is, if we really want to listen.—the Editor