Dostoevsky and the Wild Grizzlies

A.K. Anderson

As I begin writing this, I find myself past the midway point in our life’s journey, having turned forty last year. I am in the midst of my ninth year of teaching Christian history and thought at Wofford, my alma mater, and, beyond this, I have spent over half of my life studying religion in an academic context. The essay that follows is a shorthand attempt to explain both how I ended up on this path in life and how I approach and think about the subject matter I teach.[1]

There are a handful of key turning points in my academic life where I could have easily taken another path and ended up a very different person than I am today. Among these moments I would include all three of my decisions about where I would go to seek out the degrees I now hold. Without my Dad making me attend Hospitality Day at Wofford in 1985, where after hearing (now Emeritus) English Professor George Martin speak I said “This is where I’m going to school,” I have no idea where I would be today. My years as a student here, especially my time spent with the great group of Religion Department faculty at the time (Charlie Barrett, John Bullard, and Bill Mount), helped me to fall in love with liberal arts education done in a small school setting, and made me want to continue on in that setting as a teacher in the years to come. If I had not then been encouraged by both Bill Mount (to whom I owe more debts than I could ever begin to repay) and John Bullard to look beyond the South for a divinity school to attend, I undoubtedly would’ve still ended up with a good education. However, I doubt that I would have received the deep grounding in and appreciation for traditional Christian thought/theology that I received at Yale Divinity School (through teachers such as the late Brevard Childs and Robert Johnson), and I know I would not have had my horizons broadened in the way I did by living in a new part of the country for three years. Then, finally, the decision to go even further away for doctoral study, at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA, was crucial in various ways for me developing into the person and teacher I have become. In particular, living and studying at this institution where nine divinity schools (five Protestant, three Catholic, and one Unitarian) have bonded together to form a consortium that offers doctoral degrees helped me, a dyed-in-the-wool Methodist, to gain more significant knowledge than I ever had before of a variety of different Christian traditions (such as Eastern Orthodox, since there is an Orthodox center there as well) and other religions (the GTU also includes Jewish and Buddhist studies programs). In this regard, I especially had the breadth of Catholic thought and life opened up to me during my time in Berkeley, in no small part thanks to my advisor, George Griener, who is part of the Jesuit school at the GTU.

For the purposes of this essay, though, I want to emphasize another of these turning points, one that happened not long after I began attending Wofford, for it, maybe more than any one moment in my life, sent me in the direction of the academic study of religion. I came to Wofford from Jonesborough, Tennessee, where I was born and then raised by caring, loving, hard-working, and thoroughly admirable parents, teachers, and relatives. One thing that was not part of this environment, though, was thorough considerationof some of the complexities and questions connected with the Christian faith that served as the glue and assumed backdrop for daily life there. So, during my second semester of college, while in a class with the same George Martin who had lured me to Wofford, I was rather unprepared for an experience that many before me, as well as many since, have had, namely my world of belief was thrown into question through reading Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. The type of doubt expressed in the novel by the brother Ivan, especially as related to the problem of evil, was something I had never encountered before, and the novel set me off on a path of thinking harder and asking more questions about religion than I ever had before, as well as on the connected path of trying to construct my own answers to these questions. To put it one way, at this point in my education, I had my first serious contact with theology, but it came through a work of literature and not a work “theology,” narrowly defined.

I highlight this incident from 21 years ago because it, as this formative, foundational event in my academic life, continues to color the way I approach the teaching of my discipline. In particular, it impacts my view of the basic questions: “What is theology?” and “Where is it found?” Many times when I tell someone that I teach Christian theology, there is a clear assumption on the part of that other person about what that means my general job description is. That assumption is, as best I can tell, that my classes of necessity focus on a certain hit parade of major figures, who are considered to be theologians because they do their work from official academic and/or church positions, and who write in a particular type of non-fiction, straightforward prose in order to expound upon, articulate, and teach certain doctrines of the Christian community. That is, clearly and obviously, a significant part of what goes on in my courses, whether that means doing careful reading and discussion of Augustine’s City of God or Confessions, poring over Aquinas’ thoughts on natural law, or comparing and contrasting Luther, Calvin, Hegel, and Pope Leo XIII on the issue of the appropriate or desired relationship between religion and government. This kind of work is, for whatever series of reasons, simply in my bones, I love to do it, and I am extremely fortunate to be able to do it as my vocation.

However theology is, for me, a much broader enterprise than simply surveying such a hit parade or list of key “official” thinkers. Again, that early encounter with Dostoevsky has played a central role in my developing such a broader conception of theology. Three other writers have proven to be particularly influential in my thinking about and approach to my field. Those figures are Soren Kierkegaard, Michel Foucault, and James Baldwin.

Kierkegaard is (unlike Foucault or Baldwin) someone who actually would make it onto many, most, or possibly all lists of the major Christian theologians, but there are aspects of his work that make him a somewhat awkward fit in that group. In particular, the fact that he attached his own name to very few of the works he wrote makes him stand out, as he instead created characters that serve as the pseudonyms for his books. For just one example, what is likely my all-time favorite book to teach, Repetition, is in large part by the rather odd bird Constantine Constantius, who then also appears with a number of other Kierkegaard characters in a rather raucous banquet in “In Vino Veritas” from the book Stages on Life’s Way. So, are texts by Kierkegaard such as these theology, philosophy, or literature? To pick only one answer inevitably distorts the nature of Kierkegaard’s work, since they’re all of these simultaneously. In this regard Kierkegaard (to whose writings I turned not long after that first reading of The Brothers Karamazov) helped solidify that initial impact of Dostoevsky on me, in that I began to look for theology in all kinds of formats and media, not simply in the usual candidates of books of church dogmatics, theological summas, and the like. The practical result of this aspect of my background for the classes I teach is that in them students encounter not only the works of the classic standard theologians, but also, for example, the fiction of Flannery O’ Connor and Edward P. Jones, the films of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Dreyer, the music of John Coltrane and Johnny Cash, and the Christian poetry of Mary Oliver and the Jewish poetry of Nelly Sachs.

Foucault helped me expand my notions about where to look for theology in a different way. Whereas sometimes we may be inclined to think of history simply in terms of the major events and particularly famous or significant figures involved in them, in a work such as Madness and Civilization, which deals with Western treatment of mental illness in recent centuries, Foucault turns his focus to some of those (“the mad”) who are ignored in that type of grand historical narrative. He seeks out such marginalized figures not simply to have something different for the sheer sake of difference, but because he thinks individuals in this excluded group may well have truth and insight at their disposal that the mainstream, dominant, “reasonable” culture may have lost sight of. (For him, The Fool in King Lear serves as a paradigmatic figure for this point in Madness and Civilization.)

This general method demonstrated by Foucault has impacted my research and my teaching in two key ways. First, within Western Christianity I am inclined to look for theological voices that have been to a great extent ignored in order to see what insights they might have to offer. A prime example of this is found in the long-term project I am working on, a history of Western Christian thought from the turn of the 20th century up through the end of the Second Vatican Council, which is titled Belief Amidst Bombshells: Western Christian Public Thought, 1900-1965. The standard histories of this period all end up focusing on a particular sort of writer (i.e., white, male theologians, who are working in an academic setting) and in the process almost completely bypass the contributions of numerous black and female authors, simply because they do not fit into this particular academic theologian model. So, this summer I have, as part of the Wofford Community of Scholars program (funded by the Fullerton Foundation), been doing research on one such overlooked figure, Edith Stein. Stein is nowhere to be found in the current standard histories of the period, but her background (she was in her early years assistant to Edmund Husserl, the leading European philosopher at the time), writings (which range from the topic of empathy to the relationship between philosophy and theology), and history (she was a Jew who became a Christian nun, and then was killed in Auschwitz in 1942) make her as compelling as any figure who lived during this period, and she deserves to be more widely-known.

Second, beyond focusing on overlooked writers and thinkers within Western Christianity itself, Foucault’s work has influenced me to seek out Christian life and thought outside of Western Christian experience to bring into the classroom, since this is something we in our part of the world often tend to ignore. Our understanding of the Christian faith is greatly enhanced through, and diminished without, knowledge of figures like 14th century Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev, or the harrowing experiences and courage of persecuted Christians in 17th century Japan. The latter topic is the focus of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, which is likely the best received (by the students) of all the works I teach in my classes. As part of my general goal to shine more light on non-Western Christian experience, I am in the midst of developing a three-semester series of courses entitled “Christianity Among the Continents,” which will deal with the history of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and South America.

Last but not least there is James Baldwin—before Dostoevsky for me, there was Baldwin. I credit him with generally awakening my interest in reading during high school, which eventually set me onto the path to an academic career. I still remember checking out a copy of his anthology The Price of the Ticket from my hometown library, and reading it on the bus during high school basketball trips. At the time, I might have had a real understanding of 30% of what he wrote, but, rather than putting me off, that only prompted greater interest in him from me.

I mention Baldwin in the context of this essay specifically because in his works Baldwin openly expresses his disaffection with and distance from the Christian faith in which he was raised. At the time I first read him, I was attending a conservative Southern Baptist high school, and given my religious background, the likely response to such an author would be to dismiss him out of hand because of his turning away from the church. However, for whatever reason, I didn’t do that at the time, but rather tried to learn as much as I could from what he had to say, even if I didn’t agree with him every step of the way. It is because of this early positive encounter with Baldwin’s writings that in subsequent years I have been open to interaction with a variety of non-believers, and, as a result, many of the best teachers I have had have come from this general category, whether they be professors (including my favorite college teacher), writers (such as Albert Camus or Paul Celan), or friends (my best friend, for example, is an endearing, if sometimes abrasive, Freudian atheist).

This impacts my teaching and writing because I have come to see that it is often the case that those standing outside the Christian circle of belief may pick up on insights and truths that those within that circle may not have taken full account of. As such, I think these voices of dissent and criticism need to be heard and taken seriously by the Christian community, just as I think these non-believers do well to give a full hearing to Christian thought in return. Two particular figures in this general category whose work is essential to courses I teach are the filmmakers Krzysztof Kieslowski and Werner Herzog. Kieslowski is generally described in the secondary literature on him as being an agnostic, but nevertheless his series of ten one-hour movies on the Ten Commandments, Decalogue, is for my money possibly the most significant work of theological thought in recent years. Then there is Herzog, who would fit no one’s idea of a Christian believer, and his film Grizzly Man. This documentary, which covers the attempt of Timothy Treadwell to live amongst the wild grizzlies of Alaska over a number of summers, is as close to a sure-fire teaching tool of all the material that I currently use. This is in part because of Treadwell’s ultra-eccentric personality, which almost inevitably draws students’ attention to the film, but also because of the compelling, basic questions Herzog raises through the movie about God, the natural world, and the relation between the two. For example, when Herzog comments that he considers the natural world he sees in the Alaskan wild to be one of brute “chaos,” he by highlighting some of the more unpleasant sides of nature, helps challenge Christian viewers to come up with a full, adequate notion of what it means for God to be Creator of all that is, and not simply of the Maker of sunsets and roses.

In sum, for me the process of doing theology in class with students over the course of a semester is one of trying to assemble a variety of interesting, different voices for us to consider, not only Augustine and Aquinas, but also narratives by Dostoevsky and stories about wild grizzlies. Then, through a process of group discussion and deliberation, in which they learn from each other and from me, while I learn from them, we all are challenged to think hard about these different voices, determine their strengths and weaknesses, and construct for ourselves our own positions on the topics under consideration. Theology is to be found in many places, ranging from church treatises to various works of fiction and film . . . and, without question, it is also to be found in these discussions and debates taking place regularly in classrooms on the second floor of Old Main.

[1] In what follows, I try to acknowledge the way I have been shaped by a number of different writers and teachers. The title of this essay follows in that spirit as well, since it is a play on and tribute to the late philosopher Richard Rorty’s autobiographical essay “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.”