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Teaching a new dog old tricks!

Konstantin Levin (in the novel Anna Karenina) had been a free thinker since his adolescence. Then he fell in love with Dolly, the devout daughter of an orthodox Russian Prince. Soon the two were engaged to be married. But this presented a problem. Levin was reminded that the wedding must be a church wedding and that, according to orthodox norms, he must go to confession before he could receive the sacrament with Dolly. "It must be about nine years since I went to communion!" he said. He felt he would be a hypocrite to go to confession and communion, knowing he had lost his faith in all such rituals and beliefs. But his lax brother-in-law assured him the priest would go easy on him: "He'll pull the tooth out . . . before you know where you are."

A few days later Levin stood before the old priest who was expecting him. "What are your special sins?" he asked. "My chief sin is doubt," replied Levin. "I doubt everything." The priest then asked, "What do you doubt in particular?" Levin repeated, "Everything. I sometimes even doubt the existence of God." The priest smiled and asked, "What doubt can there be of the existence of God . . . when you contemplate His works? . . . How could these things be without a Creator . . . the celestial vault and stars . . . the earth with her beauty?" Levin honestly replied, "I don't know. I don't understand it all." The priest appeared puzzled at this answer and said in effect, "If you really don't know for sure how all this wonderful universe came about, then how can you exclude God as its possible source? He could be, couldn't he, for all that you know?"

It seems here the priest is leading Levin toward the 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal's famous wager, with which Pascal confronted the skeptics of his day. A skeptic is a modern type who refuses to take any wooden nickels. He trusts none of the truths fed him by society. He holds on to his capital; he will not invest in any creed, philosophy or story unless it can match his "objective" standards. Otherwise he prefers to doubt and thus protect his capital, his independence. And yet, replies Pascal, "Regarding your commercial and political interests you gamble all the time without being absolutely sure of any pay-off. You invest in this company or that candidate or party, always at the risk of losing. So why not wager that God exists? If it turns out he does, you're a winner; if not, in this case you lose nothing! You will live the life you were destined to live anyway before passing into oblivion. So why not gamble on God's existence, given the chance of a big pay off?" Now Pascal knows that even if the skeptic takes a chance on God's existing, his skepticism will remain in the saddle, hesitant to leave the starting gate; a nagging doubt will remain. And why? Because betting on God is not quite the same as believing in God - with abandon.

"So what can I do?" asks our immobilized skeptic. "Stop thinking!" says Pascal. "You want the world to conform to your mental standards, otherwise you can't trust it. The only way to emerge from that starting gate is to do violence to yourself, drive a spur into your flanks. In other words go do something as violent as dipping your fingers into a holy water font. Get your body into the act. Kneel down. Reach out literally toward God, join hands with other believers, dare to receive communion and thereby feel the grip of God's own grace drawing you both body and mind toward himself."

That's what happened to Levin. Having gone through that ritual, made contact with that priest, a change came over him. He found himself across a line and well into the depths of devout Dolly's universe. In describing the after effect of it all, this once moody free thinker said "he felt as pleased as a dog that was being taught to jump through a hoop and which, having at last caught the idea and done what was required of it, barks and wags its tail, jumping on to the table and window-sills in its delight."

-- Geoff Wood