Newsgroups: bit.listserv.literary
Date:         Wed, 29 Jul 1992 20:30:31 EDT
From:         Tim Johnson <PH408014@BROWNVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: ReReiteration

Michael says:

>Tim, you are still holding on to what strikes me as an untenable idea--that
>Levin should be able to come to his religious beliefs by an intellectual
>process, that this is the better way.

Tim quotes from his previous post:

> Thesis:  Levin is not an intellectual.
> Supporting arguments:  apart from the others detailed,
>   I offered what *he* considered to be a reasoned approach
>   to God.  It is not a well reasoned approach, an intellectual
>   approach, but rather, as naomi pointed out, an intuitive
>   approach.
>
> Not A Thesis:  Levin's sense of God is invalid.
>
> Does this make matters more clear?

Perhaps you could go back and read the full text of the post
if you still have confusions about which points I am making,
and which points I am not.

>  Second, it is faulty to assume that because Levin is not an intellectual,
>Tolstoy must not be! All of Tolstoy's work is evidence of a novelistic
>ability, and a mind, that was well capable of portraying intellectual
>characters, if that had been his goal or desire.

  It was my contention that Levin echoed many of Tolstoy's thoughts
on various issues, including that of the foundation for faith.  Certainly
it is a matter of record that Tolstoy was using him as a mouthpiece for
his views on Russia's involvement in the war.  While some characters
*act* brighter than others in Tolstoy's novels, and while some characters
are evidently mouthpieces for Tolstoy's own philosophizing, none of those
characters (as I stated before, using Levin and religion as the example)
provide solid, sound, revealing, and profound *intellectual* arguments.

>        Einstein was very deliberate too, and slow, and not nearly as good
>at making fast arithmetical calculations as most of his colleagues.  He
>thought, some say, in a slow and ponderous way. A description of his thought
>processes over time might very well have revealed him to be a real slow-poke.

  A catalog of his thoughts, in fact, reveal him to be a thinker of
tremendous stature.  I've read Einstein.  I've studied Einstein.  And
Levin, sir, is no Einstein.

>(1) For some reason, Tim, you are still suggesting by your phrasing that
>Levin should have based his religious decision on more intellectual, less
>intuitive grounds

  I am not, and I have not.

>(2)Even if you want to call this a limitation in Levin, it is a big and
>unwarranted leap to ascribe the same limitation to Tolstoy! Does _Madame
>Bovary_ prove that Flaubert was a silly bourgeois woman?

  No, but there is ample evidence that Levin served as a mouthpiece
for the author in the same way that Mishkin and Ivan did for Dostoevsky.

  It is this that I had hoped to avoid.  A simple reiteration of
points made earlier.  I am not saying, and have not said, that Levin's
intuitive approach to God is invalid.  I have said that it is not
an intellectual approach.  I have said that in as much as Levin's
approach to God reflects Tolstoy's thoughts on the issue, it reveals
a shallow examination of some of the more serious issues surrounding
an omni-etc and benevolent God.  [And I hereby apologize to the list
for the errant "a" that appeared in my previous spellings of that
word.  oops.]  I don't think that I have added anything in this post
that could possibly make that more clear, and I would like to avoid
another round of "how can you say that Levin's approach to God was
invalid?"
                             -Tim
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