Page 19 - GALIET BENEATH THE ICON: The Lamp Dostoevsky´s Kirillov IV

is to keep inventing God to go on living and not kill himself...During the entire course of global history I alone am the first person who doesn’t want to invent God.”24 While Kirillov tries to override his heart by convincing his “mind” that God doesn’t exist, we know his heart is with God: “there is no secret that won’t be made known,” says Kirillov, “That’s what He said” as he points to the savior after having lit the burning lamp once again. What could be more symbolically beautiful than a burning lamp flickering at a time of chaos: faith. In the Republic25 Plato knows of this faith when Socrates invites his friends to participate in the “torch race on horseback for the goddess tonight.”26 It is in this humble act that we feel how Kirillov’s heart yearns and aches for her and delights in her, and how his reason betrays him into thinking she is a fiction! To excessively reason our existence is to live in the quotidian and deny our own being and our potential for magic florabundance:
“Thou hast a lap full of seed, And this is a fine country.
Why doesn’t thou not cast thy seed And live in it merrily?”
(William Blake)
24 p. 692
25 Grube, G.M.A. ed. and trans. Plato Republic. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 1992.
26 Grube, G.M.A. ed. and trans. Plato Republic. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 1992. 328a
• 19 •