EVERYTHING IS PEACEFUL LOVE

March 25, 2025

Dostoevsky, Bon Iver; Affirmations of Life

I’ve just finished my first read through Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (I won’t be spoiling the story in this piece) and if there is any one image that will reside with me as I put up this remarkable book till next time, it is this: Love everything. I’ve named this piece using the title of another (more recent) artwork which I believe expands the beauty of Dostoevsky’s words hundreds of years earlier: Everything is Peaceful Love by Bon Iver.

Though I am new to Dostoevsky’s work, I have been an avid listener and fan of Bon Iver for many years. The presence this song has held in my life since its release a few weeks ago is easily traced to the unfolding of this love story throughout the years that I’ve listened to his music. Similar to Dostoevsky’s “Hosanna through a furnace of doubt”, I’m enamored by Bon Iver’s “Everything is love” especially because I first found him “up in the woods”. 

I don’t specifically intend to make lengthy commentary on Dostoevsky or Bon Iver’s work; there are many more capable than myself at doing that. I do intend however to point out and relate to these two artists’ proclamations of love in the midst of suffering. Starting with just that; the furnace of doubt. What expands and preserves the earnest appeal for love in these two is exactly the earnest expression of suffering that showed their prowess in the first place. We as engaged readers and listeners come into contact with something beyond: first through death, then through life. 

Borrowing from the aforementioned line from Dostoevsky, the first part of this project will be attentive to the furnace, while the second will be my offering of an onion. This too is borrowed from The Brothers Karamazov, and I will provide a summation of the tale in this latter part.

Following the release of Bon Iver’s first and most suffering-saturated record, the song Woods (from the EP Blood Bank) features the same ethereal, yearning voice that launched his career in the first place. Only this time, the hollow singing repeats just one simple refrain:

I quoted the first phrase in my introduction as, in my opinion, this track is Justin Vernon’s (Bon Iver) most succinct, most guttural, and most despair-laced piece to date. For those who haven’t listened, we begin with a lonesome, quiet voice and slowly progress to a passionate chorus through a layering of Justin’s own harmony. This song has functioned for me as an ode to loneliness and a hymn to the eternal realities through which suffering draws the sufferer to connectivity.

What is gracefully understated lyrically is visceral sonically. Loss and longing. A yearn to stop time. I recognize I am not sharing anything groundbreaking in this tangled song breakdown, but what I wish to convey here is that Bon Iver’s recent affirmation of life was, like Dostoevsky’s, refined in a furnace of doubt. For Justin Vernon; heartbreak, social tragedy, and nostalgia are commonplace in what I’d refer to as his suffering environment. For Dostoevsky, it was the world-shattering deaths of his two young children. It is impossible to articulate with words the great beauty that has lifted these two into their praise for life. Hence music. Hence fiction.

I’ll draw a third artist into this conversation briefly to further this point (I will not elaborate on his role here much more, but I could probably write another two pages on his work as it relates to this topic (maybe it’ll be a series)), Nick Cave:

With Woods in mind, we turn to the Grand Inquisitor; perhaps the great climax of Dostoevsky’s work in TBK and seen by many as one of the greatest literary pieces of all time. I will not recount (nor spoil) the miniature tale of the Grand Inquisitor, but it is well worth the read. Essentially, our young hero of the story and novice monk, Alyosha, is sat with one of his older brothers, Ivan. Ivan is a cunning intellectual, and wrapped deeply in a sort of New Atheist ideology where he rather memorably concludes: “without God, all things are permitted.” 

During their meeting, Ivan recites to Alyosha a poem he has written: The Grand Inquisitor. Among the many conclusions drawn by a corrupted priest in a confrontation with Jesus is that freedom was a curse and is truly unwanted by humankind; Jesus made a mistake. We see in Book 5 also a scathing (truly gut-wrenching) criticism of Christianity in the needless suffering of children. What Ivan seeks is not to prove God’s nonexistence, but to procaim instead that regardless of his existence, if His plan requires the death of innocent, angelic children, then he (Ivan) will not agree to God’s world. He will, “return his ticket”. 

The Grand Inquisitor and the encircling chapters in book 5 (Pro and Contra) are about as hot a furnace as any religious man can find outside real, experienced death. It is beautifully written and unnerving to read. This, however, cannot be understated: it is precisely the Woods, it is precisely the Grand Inquisitor, which must be read, heard, and seen if our “Hosanna” is to ever burn eternally unconsumed.

This is not discrediting the great love of childlike faith, only saying that children are faithful in their innocent goodness, still unseparated from God himself because of their lack of knowledge of evil- unfortunately we know freedom, and thus we both know and have dealt evil.

What both of these works share is their lack of answers. Many (I think correctly) refer to TBK as a form of anti-theodicy, following the framework laid by Job. The idea is, to oversimplify it, that we as humans have no capacity and no business rationally justifying God- positively or negatively. What we are given is instead an invitation: we cannot and should not rationalize suffering, nor can we rationalize love. Christians are graced in their lack of theodicy. For us, life is to be viewed phenomenologically; we experience it but do not need to understand it. We are relieved of the duty to justify, set free to live and exist relationally. Most beautifully put, Frederick Buechner: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

Underscoring Buechner’s magnificently simple phrase is the tale of the Onion, told by Dostoevsky in TBK. Allow me to paraphrase:

An onion. After reciting this parable the speaker, Grushenka, shares with Alyosha and Rakitin (another smug intellectual) her life story for the first time. A character that has up to this point been presented and judged as a conniving and morally wrought woman is suddenly seen in the context of her whole story. There is a great rise of empathy in the reader as our young monk forgives her and comments, “there may be a treasure in this soul.” Enraptured by the love she’s been shown by Alyosha, Grushenka questions him endlessly in disbelief that she could be forgiven, that she could be loved “not only for [her] shame.”

Alyosha takes her hands and replies, “What have I done to you? I gave you an onion, a very small onion, and that’s all!”

“Why do you stand in awe of me?” the elder monk Zosima later asks Alyosha in a vision of Jesus’ wedding feast, “I gave away an onion, and I’m here, too.”

I will not be able to accentuate through summation the emotional heft of these stories, but hopefully it is clear that the onion is a simple, tender-hearted expression of love and, ultimately, all we have to give. An onion is a song. An onion is a novel. An onion is a whispered prayer, a feeling of joy, a tinge of guilt. Keeping in the frame of these two art pieces, the giving away of an (your) onion is, when expanded, an affirmation of life. I specify these as affirmations of life, not faith, because we are speaking of something slightly different. Sure, life is contingent on faith, but this is not an affirmation solely of future freedom, it is our pronouncement of fearlessness now. Our recognition of horrors greeted with a delicate kiss.

This same kiss marks the deep love strung throughout TBK. In lieu of quoting the entirety of the novel, I’ll hone this theme into one more moment with our dear Alyosha. After the aforementioned vision of his elder Father Zosima, he rushes outside into a dark, starry night. The “silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens” and he throws himself onto the earth: 

Here is the beauty of it all. Everything is peaceful love. We take responsibility for all, we reflect empathy to all, we embrace and smile cheerfully at all. This to me is the essence of joy; to take the world as it is, yet hope.

It is well-known that we are vast and multitudinous. I must make clear in these final thoughts that, as with all of life’s complexities, we are not linear movers. One does not get out of the furnace by giving an onion. Do not think that way. One will always be burning, the onion though, is what keeps us enamored and overjoyed by abundance. Like the old tale of Moses, we too must recognize ourselves reflected in the burning bush; aflame with eternal realities but unconsumed.

We are neither to return our tickets in despair, nor fully engorge ourselves with helpless positivity. True affirmation of life is to reside in both.

Dostoevsky again:

And Justin Vernon:

These men are both much older than I: that gives me great encouragement. I fear the thought that some day I could look back upon my own writing and brush it away as childlike naivete and wishful thinking. Some would say optimism is a youthful passion. I also fear that if my current suffering is not what will rob my faith, what greater suffering will come? Perhaps other older persons will say time. Time itself is the suffering that will rob my faith. Dostoevsky, though, has been buried for 143 years, and I feel strongly that his eternally great works of literature continue to hold out an onion, and that no Grand Inquisitor and no time will come that will not indeed pass. 

As for me, I will follow the Lord. I affirm life. I affirm Christ as life. I hope to be satisfied every morning with steadfast love.

The late elder Zosima:

“Everything is Peaceful Love”  (Bon Iver,  2025)
“The Brothers Karamazov”  Translated by Michael R. Katz (Fyodor Dostoevsky,  2024)

In Scottish tradition the name meant son of marsh dwellers. In English; boy born in the swamp. Once a boy of the flowers and a young adult of the forest; I, Carson, am nowadays a man of the marsh. 

Admittedly, when I first heard of this meaning, this namesake, as a youth, it was rather embarrassing. I knew myself to be wild at heart, but to be named as the marsh dweller seemed somewhat demeaning- much to the joy of my older brothers. This was especially lucid in contrast to the namesake I had grown fond of: the great frontiersman and furtrapper Kit Carson. He was a mythic story, a legend and, unfortunately, a controversy.

Yet I am now allured by the swamp. Between flowers and ferns and pines- I always saw myself as a man of creation, a thing of the woods and wild places and wild gods. Here today, as I was reminded of that preteen confrontation with my (name’s) less eloquent origins, I felt rather inspired by the swamp- the misty, creaturely, mostly uninhabited and undomesticated water-logged land. A place of witches and spells and dense fog, a place where our hero faces the darkness and their enemy. The realm of ignoble faeires that threaten our virtue and the power of virtue at large.

The swamp is then a member of the same mythos carried by the desert or the dark night. It is a space for the evil and a space for the brave. Only plants and creatures accustomed to the murky water may grow; only the greatest of men can wade its rooty current to cross. Snapping jaws and stringy knotted growths loom in its spellbound depths. It is unknown and fearful. Our Lord was tempted three times in that parched land of sand and bone- so too we face our sufferings and desires in the shadowy figure of mangroves and shroud of fog. The marsh tests the righteous and confuses them with its dark magic. It is the place of Death’s rule, witch’s curse, and maybe, hope’s victory.

So then I am a man of the marsh. The boy born of the swamp. I wrestle with evil. I resist the dark magic. I will navigate the murk of stagnant water. Here is the reason of which I write and paint- “to find, in the midst of hell, what isn’t hell”. I wish to be pious with my pain. I wish to utter a prayer in the destitute time. If my journey is toward God, it will be haunted by ghosts of chaos past and premonitions of chaos to come. Yet my question is: can the swamp be made sacred? Can molded bones live like the dry? Then I too must be like Ezekiel in the Valley- devoted to hope, devoted to prayer. In this swamp there will be predators and Death and the threat of death, but there will also be, deep amongst the mangrove roots and shadowed by the willows, entangled in vines and breaking light through the mist; a shrine. My story: a boy born in the swamp, like all humanity, and a man who nonetheless has built a shrine, a man who nonetheless uttered a prayer, a God who nonetheless joined us also as a man in the marsh.

It has been sung by poets for a long while now that certainty is a false hope; a bronze serpent without its spirit. It is unfortunate that our pastors have also for a long while waited for its healing, unaware or too hard of heart to hear that its breathing has stopped. A great many people, pastors and laity alike, would have you believe that the certainty they have is truth. Their poets and prophets though, lay down with mouths to the dust, and plead their eyes would notice the truth has moved on. 

Surprising as it may be, Truth and certainty are quite different things. Truth, sustained in the Logos by its Breath, is living and active. It is dynamic, stable, but dynamic in its choosing; of fact and story and rest, it finds us as we find it. It was the Israelites who showed us best, believing their Temple was unpunishable because God had once dwelt in it, despite their idolatry and inviting of Death. What they had not known and even rebuked from Jeremiah, is that the Breath that once built it had carried its presence and protection elsewhere. What they had was certainty; failing to see that what was true was now true differently. Certainty was a grasp of what was truth for the moment, a pause in its flow, and an unwillingness to see where it was off to next. In this sense certitude is quite brittle, it is static and caged because, like those who we say “live in the past”, it is fully established in only one frame of a life the Truth once lived. A picture of Truth no doubt, but no longer with the spirit that inhabited it.

This is not to say the Truth is not real or even absolute. As we know, God’s protection was a promise, His covenant was unchanging. However, that protection was not with the certainty of the Temple’s sacred nature, it was with God. The promised Truth is not that the Israelites would always be protected, but that their God was protective. To their dismay, the exile and the Temple’s eventual destruction made lucid that what they arrogantly paraded as truth was mere condensation off the Breath that was not one sharp exhale, but a sustained contraction of the lungs that created it. 

Just like God gave antidote to a poisoned people through a serpent of bronze for a moment, or led Balaam through the loosened mouth of a donkey, so too must we be alert to the Spirit, lest we find ourselves knelt down writhing before a statue, or in a pen, desperately awaiting life in the words of an ass.