The Springs of Life

I happened upon a most interesting chapter in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ today, brimming with anti-Enlightenment sentiment. It’s Prince Myshkin’s birthday, and everyone has descended on the villa he has rented in Pavlovsk, to help him celebrate. Holding court is a cretinous amateur lawyer called, Lebedyev, talking of “the springs of life”, explaining his point by telling the story of a man who in the twelfth century, to combat hunger, ate 60 monks and 6 infants. This is where Lebedyev concludes:

“Now for the conclusion, the finale, gentlemen, in which lies the solution of one of the greatest questions of that age and of this! The criminal ends by going and giving information against himself to the clergy and gives himself up to the authorities. One wonders what tortures awaited him in that age – the wheel, the stake and the fire. Who was it urged him to go and inform against himself? Why not simply stop short at sixty and keep the secret till his dying breath? Why not simply relinquish the clergy and live in penitence as a hermit? Why not, indeed, enter a monastery himself? Here is the solution. There must have been something stronger than stake and fire, stronger even than the habit of twenty years! There must have been and idea stronger than any misery, famine, torture, plague, leprosy, and all that hell, which mankind could not have endured without that idea, which bound men together, guided their hearts, and fructified the springs of life. Show me anything like such a force in our age of vices and railways…I should say of steamers and railways, but I say vices and railways, because I’m drunk but truthful. Show me any idea binding mankind together today with anything like the power it had in those centuries. And dare to tell me that the springs of life have not been weakened and muddied beneath the “star”, beneath the network in which men are enmeshed. And don’t try to frighten me with your prosperity, your wealth, the infrequency of famine and the rapidity of the means of communication. There is more wealth, but there is less strength. There is no uniting idea; everything has grown softer, everything is limp, and every one is limp! We’ve all, all of us grown limp. “

Sounds familiar…?