Ivan Karamazov on the Second Commandment

The fol­low­ing is a mod­i­fied ver­sion of a pre­vi­ously writ­ten essay.

Ivan begins by quot­ing the sec­ond great­est com­mand­ment: “love your neigh­bor as your­self“¹. He admits to Alyosha (his brother) that, “I never could under­stand how it’s pos­si­ble to love one’s neigh­bors,“² though he can under­stand the admi­ra­tion of one’s neigh­bour. Ivan cre­ates a dis­tinc­tion here between admi­ra­tion of one’s neigh­bour, and truly lov­ing one’s neigh­bour as one­self. It is pos­si­ble, says Ivan, to “love one’s neigh­bour abstractly, and even occa­sion­ally from a dis­tance, but hardly ever close up“³. I sus­pect the sim­ple rea­son for this is because, as Ivan says, “he is another and not me“⁴. As I under­stand Ivan, he is say­ing that peo­ple do not love that which they do not iden­tify with. Fur­ther, they do not love that which they find unde­sir­able, and they do not love that which they find offen­sive. They may pro­fess love, per­haps out of a feel­ing of reli­gious oblig­a­tion, or guilt. But, sus­pects Ivan, it is more likely admi­ra­tion. By admi­ra­tion Ivan most prob­a­bly means a sense of won­der­ment. We see the suf­fer­ing of another (from afar) and cre­ate a fic­tion regard­ing the cir­cum­stances of their suf­fer­ing. We imag­ine their suf­fer­ing to be akin to how we would suf­fer. Their cir­cum­stances to be akin to the cir­cum­stances we would suf­fer in. Their responses would be our responses. Through admi­ra­tion we turn the suf­fer­ing of another into our own mon­strous day dream. We make their real­ity a fic­tion of our imag­i­na­tion, and, in response, pro­fess to love them, when in fact the oppo­site is true. We are prob­a­bly the fur­thest away from lov­ing them as we could pos­si­bly be. Not only because we’re mak­ing a day dream out of their cir­cum­stances, but because of the very fact of how we pro­fess to love them–from afar.

It is easy to admire a man from a dis­tance because therein it’s pos­si­ble to project our­selves onto and in place of him. Per­haps, to go another step fur­ther, we pity and set our­selves above he who is suf­fer­ing. For not only do we imag­ine his cir­cum­stances and his reac­tions, we imag­ine that this is how he ought to react, to react any other way is not good enough.  We judge him to be suf­fer­ing in a poor way, to where we might get away with deny­ing he is suf­fer­ing at all. Admi­ra­tion may turn to con­ceit, “oh, he’s not really suf­fer­ing. I’ve suf­fered through worse!” whereas love would turn to noth­ing but greater love. In real­ity, we are only lov­ing a pro­jec­tion of our­selves, or per­haps we are lov­ing a fic­tion, where at the cen­ter we find our­selves, though not suffering.

Try to love a man up close, says Ivan, and we’ll dis­cover that “as soon as he shows his face–love van­ishes“⁵. Up close we face the human­ity of another, all they pos­sess and all that we find unde­sir­able about them. We find that their fea­tures are repul­sive, their man­ner­isms annoy­ing, their con­duct, appalling. We dis­cover that their suf­fer­ing is not as we think it should be. We hap­pen upon the cir­cum­stances of their suf­fer­ing, alien to our own and beyond our will­ing­ness to iden­tify. We judge their reac­tions as, again, insuf­fi­cient. We real­iza­tion that our admi­ra­tion of their suf­fer­ing was lit­tle more than a fic­ti­tious day-dream, an intel­lec­tu­al­iza­tion and belit­tle­ment of another. Para­dox­i­cally, we despise them for this, “Well, had he been suf­fer­ing ‘this way’ or ‘that way,’ I might have under­stood!” Love van­ishes because of our inabil­ity or unwill­ing­ness to iden­tify with him. We are called to love him in spite of him­self, and in spite of our­selves. But we can­not iden­tify with him, so that his suf­fer­ing is beyond the love we might give him.

Is Christ’s love for peo­ple truly a mir­a­cle, now impos­si­ble, on earth?