Newsgroups: bit.listserv.literary
Date:         Tue, 28 Jul 1992 15:29:37 EDT
From:         Tim Johnson <PH408014@BROWNVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Levin

  I think I've said about all I can on this particular aspect,
but I'll answer Michael B's remarks anyhow.

>        What does his nervousness have to do with his intelligence? And in
>the quote from chapter 9....

  Certainly we can go through each of the examples (of which I only
quoted a few) and say "here he is merely nervous, there he is simply
not as well educated, there he is responding to the senselessness of
it, and in that situation, it was his earnestness in comparison to
his companions' approach that lent him the appearance of a dullard."
  My point is not that any one example singles him out as a man of
profoundly mediocre means, but that the sum of these (and many
other examples) are better explained with the single word "simpleton"
than with long lists of excuses, one for each particular instance.
He is a man who wishes to be an intellectual but has not the capacity
for it.

>        Finally, there is never any _founded_ conviction that God must exist,
>at least no conviction founded on rational thought. Is he being asked here
>to base his religious feelings on a strictly intellectual foundation? Why
>should he be required to justify his belief that way.

  No, not at all.  Don't confuse your concerns or mine with his.  The
decision to seek and express a rational foundation for faith is something
he *chose* to make, not something I am asking him to provide.  *I* don't
require such justification - if anyone did, he did; or he believed he did.

>He says that he believes
>for his own reasons, but will not presume to say therefore that all people
>who believe differently, and for other reasons, are wrong. I'd say that's a
>kind of tolerance in religion that the world has seen too little of .

  Again, I disagree with this as well.  I don't think he was expressing
a tolerance - saying "God exists for me, but maybe not for other people."
He ended trying to be firmly convinced in the absolute existence of the
supreme Deity.  (I'll show my tolerance by allowing you to evaluate his
success at that - you already know, I suspect, what I would say of his
effort.)  The difficulty he was expressing was how other people with the
same internal revelation (principle of goodness) could come to substantially
different notions of God or dogma.  And while I suspect it is safe to say
that Levin would not have enforced his view at the end of a sword, and
could not have done so with a sharpened wit (if this, to you, means
tolerance) I don't think it implies that he had adopted any sort of
"relativistic" approach.
  Levin, throughout the novel, was faced with situations where he came
into contact with people who believed differently than he did.  His
answer, after he had sufficiently cleared his head, was not to admit that
perhaps they were right in their own way, but to *know* that he was
correct and they were wrong, and to know that he couldn't convince them,
and to feel no need to convince them.  A tolerance of a sort, but one
which should not be confused with a tolerance that is acceptance of
the validity of alternative proposals.

                                 -Tim
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