Crime and Punishment is my favourite novel.  And yet somehow I’ve managed to never read any of Dostoevsky’s other novels. So, I’ve started reading Brothers Karamazov, in the 2002 translation by Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky.  I’m not far into it but already I’m starting to love it.  Last week as I was preparing my sermon on Naaman the Leper, there was a scene in the novel that resonated with everything I’d been researching and thinking about in terms of Naaman’s healing.

In the scene, a lady is confessing to a wise elder, Father Zosima, that she doesn’t think she could really “actively love,” since she always wants recognition and reward.  Here’s Zosima’s reply:

“I heard exactly the same thing, a long time ago to be sure, from a doctor,” the elder remarked.  “He was then an old man, and unquestionably intelligent.  He spoke just as frankly as you, humorously, but with a sorrowful humor.  ‘I love mankind,’ he said, ‘but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons.  In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience.  As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom.  In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose.  I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.’”

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