The Tyranny of Rationality

Contributed by Isaac T. Jirak

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

The battle between faith and reason is as old as time; philosophers, theologians, and coffee house theorists debate and philosophize on the issue incessantly, claiming that one further argument will finally settle the matter. It is the perennial nature of the debate, however, that makes it a fundamental human question. From behind our most cherished convictions comes a quiet voice asking, “What does it mean to believe?”

There is, notably, a trap inherent in discussing this issue. Making an argument de facto preselects one side of the debate. On the one hand, making a rational argument for reason over faith only confirms what you have already asserted. It is question-begging because in setting out to make an argument, you have assumed that you could reach a conclusion through a proper argument. Conversely, arguing for faith over reason seems to contradict itself, since any justification of faith implies that you must forfeit the arguments that got you there. As a result, we are left with an antinomy that we can stand on ourselves, but we cannot use it to convince others since it rests on circular assumptions.

Leo Tolstoy explores this dynamic in Anna Karenina, which follows the development of three women and their respective marriages.¹ His narrative artfully guides the reader through themes of love, faith, morality, and justice. And among these themes, the reader finds Tolstoy weaving in the question of rationality and faith, such as in Kostya Levin’s mental crisis and the contention over religion in his marriage to Kitty. Tolstoy tirelessly battles over the question, but in the end, the book comes to an insight into the true conflict between rationality and faith, offering a resolution to antimony.

Kitty is devoutly religious, but Levin, though he wishes to believe, wrestles with an insurmountable agnosticism. To Kitty, religion is a simple matter-of-fact by which she lives, and speaking of Levin, she says, “She knew what tormented her husband. It was his unbelief. Although…his unbelief did not make her unhappy; and…she smiled as she thought about his unbelief and said to herself that he was funny.”² What makes this passage so interesting is that Kitty does not speak with some highfalutin’ religiosity to condemn Levin nor with a perfunctory faith that dismisses the gravity of religion. Instead, she recognizes the severity of agnosticism in light of her Christian faith, saying that he is presently outside of salvation, but she sees the absurdity of it all in the comparison of human reason to God’s infinite knowledge. The rational arguments that Levin struggles with do not bother her, not because of any lack of knowledge, but because of their utter irrelevance to sublime faith.

Levin struggles to see life from Kitty’s point of view and instead opts for a more rational approach, vigorously searching for arguments that might give him a satisfactory answer to his existential questions. Nevertheless, no matter how complex the different arguments may be, Levin always finds himself in a “house of cards,” at first seemingly impressive and capable of offering refuge, but upon contextualizing the arguments in reality, “the whole artificial edifice would collapse.”³ In reference to “Plato, and Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer—the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic explanation of life,”⁴ Levin would follow “vague words such as spirit, will, freedom, substance, deliberately falling into the verbal trap set for him by the philosophers or by himself.”⁵ He would convince himself of their legitimacy, only to wind up unsatisfied with the final conclusion. He could reason himself through belief and faith, finding a rational mechanism that could stand itself up. Where Kitty found meaning and purpose, however, Levin, though voraciously clutching to some semblance of meaning, only found the entire enterprise worthless. The solutions he found were solutions indeed, for they reached logical conclusions to satisfy the intellect, but they only made his search for belief meaningless, starving the soul and leaving him no better off than where he started. We are even told, “Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it….But Levin did not shoot himself or hang himself and went on living.”⁶ Levin is struck with existential pain because he has admitted the legitimacy of the question, but to find peace, he must admit the legitimacy of the answer.

The reason Levin struggles so much with the question of religion is that he starts from a set of premises that he already finds dissatisfying. In all his reading, Levin has made the de facto assumption that religion may only come about through reason, but his eventual assent to faith only comes through releasing this presupposition. In a conversation with one of his workers, Levin makes the realization that man is meant “To live not for one’s own needs but for God,” saying “Didn’t I understand those meaningless words of Fyodor’s? And having understood, did I doubt their rightness?”⁷ The simplicity of these words points to their transcendence and veracity. Admitting the truth of the statement, Levin releases his rigid grip on rationality to accept the sublimity of religion.

Following this conversation, Levin recounts the existence of fundamental truths that have guided him as a child that are self-evident (seen through their inexplicable influence on him), yet conquering them through rationality is their undoing, such as a love of family, which, under rationalistic scrutiny, misses the point that makes these connections so vitally important to him. The inexplicable truth that he discovers: “to live for God, for the soul,”⁸ is so clearly articulated in faith. Yet so often, this simple phrase is desperately misunderstood, with rationalist thinkers reducing it to a slave mentality, when, instead, it is simply quintessential essence.“To live for God” is not a reduction of the intellect to serve some fantasized construct but it is what it means to live in itself. There is no further rationalization; this insight is the ineffable bedrock of humanity, and it is all that we need. In the dichotomy of rationality and faith, the latter is this ratification that our lives are meant “to live for God, for the soul” because that is what our lives are.

Levin makes no discovery in ratifying this statement because it is something he has already actualized in himself. In Levin’s assent to faith, the assent and its justification are one and the same, and it comes from the very act of living. To live is “to live for God,” and there is no secondary or ancillary cause. We can go on trying to find justifications for why ‘to live’ is ‘to live for God,’ but any justification skips over the very essence of that statement. It is a truth that we all know, for it is fundamentally written in our souls as beings who live, for if we live, then we live for God.

Faith, then, is a categorically distinct justification for religion, as compared to rationality. Their objects are as far apart as their means; rationality justifies religion through the exercise of the mind, but faith establishes a basis for religion through being. In this regard, Levin has always been a religious character, which is perhaps why Kitty was never excessively agitated with his unbelief. This religious perspective is what makes Levin and Kitty’s marriage so distinct from the other two marriages. With each of the couples, Tolstoy creates parallel conflicts to illustrate the principles that guide each marriage. In doing so, he presents a dichotomy to the reader to choose between religion or irreligion, each with its own pleasures and pains.

For Levin, as a religious man, though not always one with faith, “He lived (without being aware of it) by those spiritual truths that he had drunk in with his mother’s milk…Now it was clear to him that he was able to live only thanks to the beliefs in which he had been brought up.”⁹ The spiritual truths made Levin into a man of principle, which is evident from the beginning of the book, hundreds of pages before he ever makes the assent to faith. He constantly pushes back against the irreligion of his contemporaries, despite occasionally being made the fool in his interactions with them. Levin finds it impossible to live any other way, finding a secular life more dissatisfying than his struggle against the incomprehensibility of faith. His beliefs made him the way he is, and among these beliefs is the very same in which he makes his assent to faith. Reflecting, he says, “‘What would I be and how would I live my life, if I did not have those beliefs, did not know that one should live for God and not for one’s needs? I would rob, lie, kill. Nothing of what constitutes the main joys of my life would exist for me.’”¹⁰

Yet why does a life governed by principle and restraint satisfy and even give pleasure to Levin when he rejects many of the pleasures that many of us take for granted today? What Tolstoy is trying to emphasize in Levin’s monologue is not that his beliefs bound him from enjoying secular pleasures. Rather, he is pointing to the meaning and sense of purpose that Levin has gotten from his principles and the pleasure he has in fulfilling them. Tolstoy is setting up an aesthetic archetype in Levin’s morality by alluding to a higher-order perception that transcends base passions and appreciates more meaningful joys. However, this distinction does not rely simply on the fact that Levin was born with these beliefs that enable him to have these pleasures, but it is again reminiscent of the fact that Levin is a religious man through his dogged pursuit of faith through reason. If Levin was not religious or moral, then these joys would not only be inaccessible, but they would not even exist—there would be nothing of the sort even to be felt. Still, Levin is not a religious man because of his beliefs; instead, it is his acknowledgment of the gravity of the question of religion that enables him to partake in these joys.

What, then, do we make of the battle between faith and rationality? Admittedly, Levin’s faith and Kitty’s faith do not have the same timbre, and it would be rash to say that they are the same; however, the difference is not very drastic. The critical feature of Levin’s newfound faith is its unilateral character in which expression and existence are contained within the same action; to be is to have faith. Levin has reoriented his mode of being from living for “one’s own needs” to living “for God.”¹¹ Before making this realization, he lived as any other ordinary irreligious man—for his needs, for his appetites. This was not any conscious mode of being but was his de facto state, yet he found such a deep dissatisfaction in it that he was moved to reorient his being. Living for one’s needs naturally entails seeking to satisfy rationality since rationality is subsumed in the same existence as appetites.

Levin discovered, however, that instead of finding a solution within this existence, he had to flip his entire being: “I sought an answer to my question. But the answer to my question could not come from thought, which is incommensurable with the question.”¹² Levin breaks from reason in this realization that he does not have to live for his appetites but can live for God, and in doing so, he recognizes the paradox that reason had placed him in. In opening this topic, I mentioned the seeming antinomy between faith and reason, but this antinomy only comes from the premise of reason itself. The idea that ‘any justification of faith implies that you must forfeit the arguments that got you there’ is only partially true because it is still being understood on reason’s terms. A more accurate representation of faith’s justification is ‘A person holds faith in living faith.’

When we enter into this conversation with the idea that we have to justify faith, we immediately forfeit our footing to the tyranny of rationality. He who lives for God need not submit to such a discussion, and instead, he should recognize “not only the pride of reason but the stupidity of reason. And, above all—the slyness, precisely the slyness, of reason. Precisely the swindling of reason.”¹³ Kitty may not have needed to complete the same mental gymnastics as Levin, but her faith is very similar in refusing to acquiesce to the tyranny of rationality. In laughing at her husband’s agnosticism, she recognizes the stupidity of reason, which has no basis for contending the foundation of faith. Tolstoy’s lesson then seems to be: irreligion destroys a man, religion justifies him; reason can guide him, but faith makes him.

FISHER AMES

A version of this article originally appeared in Forever Young, the December 2024 print issue of the Salient.

1. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London, England: Penguin Classics, 2013).

2. Ibid., 784.

3. Ibid., 788.

4. Ibid., 787.

5. Ibid., 788.

6. Ibid., 789.

7. Ibid., 795.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 797.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 795.

12. Ibid., 797.

13. Ibid.