God Below: A Faith Born in Hell—Life and Fate and the Otherwise Than Being

Karl Shankar Sengupta

doi:10.3390/h10020084

Abstract

This essay examines the idea of kenosis and holy folly in the years before, during, and after the Holocaust. The primary focus will be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, though it also will touch upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons and the ethics of the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, speaking to their intersecting ideas. Dostoevsky, true enough, predates the Shoah, whereas Grossman was a Soviet Jew who served as a journalist (most famously at the Battle of Stalingrad), and Levinas was a soldier in the French army, captured by the Nazis and placed in a POW camp. Each of these writers wrestles with the problem of evil in various ways, Dostoevsky and Levinas as theists—one Christian, the other Jewish—and Grossman as an atheist; yet, despite their differences, there are ever deeper resonances in that all are drawn to the idea of kenosis and the holy fool, and each writer employs variations of this idea in their respective answers to the problem of evil. Each argues, more or less, that evil arises in totalizing utopian thought which reifies individual humans to abstractions—to The Human, and goodness to The Good. Each looks to kenosis as the “antidote” to this utopian reification.

Highlights

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
Levinas himself relates in an interview with François Poirié that it was his readings in Russian authors like “Pushkin, Lermontov, and Dostoevsky, above all Dostoevsky” that laid the foundation for his work in philosophy and ethics (Robbins 2001, p. 28)
Grossman’s work is the prime focus of this essay, which concerns literature of the Holocaust; yet it must be stressed that his work simultaneously harkens back to Dostoevsky and points ahead to Levinas, primarily in terms of their affirmation of ethics—kenotic ethics, which is grounded in Biblical theism and embodies a self-emptying undertaken for the good of the Other

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Levinas himself relates in an interview with François Poirié that it was his readings in Russian authors like “Pushkin, Lermontov, and Dostoevsky, above all Dostoevsky” that laid the foundation for his work in philosophy and ethics

Results

Conclusion