Influenced is an interview series featuring authors talking about the works that influenced them.

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Thick Skin, where authors talk about negative reviews, from both critics and readers

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Episode XV: "All the things I had thought but had never dared put into words"

Published 6/5/17
In this installment, Meghan O'Gieblyn talks about leaving the church, finding transhumanism, The Brothers Karamazov the Benedict Option, autofiction & more.

Today I’m with Meghan O’Gieblyn, a writer, most recently of “Ghost in the Cloud”, a piece in n+1 about her detachment from Christianity and her discovery of transhumanism, and the unlikely connections between the two faiths.

It’s a remarkable piece, both for your story and the storytelling; you speak with supermundane calm, delivering titanic thoughts with swift clarity. An excerpt: “At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse — drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate — were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the holy spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined.”

I read the story on and off while traveling six time zones west in the early afternoon, the sun seeming to have lost interest in falling, an impossibility of a day reflecting the impossibilities of transhumanism. Often times while reading I wondered how much of it you thought was possible and how much of it you entertained because it stirred you in the right way. It seemed to me, and I may be wrong, that you approached the movement in a sort of second-order way: more intellectual than emotional, unable to dedicate to it the heart you’d already spent on your first love, Christianity.

We’ll talk about all this and more, through the lens of The Brothers Karamazov, a book which you said helped cleave you from the faith: “My doubts began in earnest during my second year at Bible school, after I read The Brothers Karamazov and entertained, for the first time, the implications of the classic theodicies — the problem of hell, how evil could exist in a world created by a benevolent God. In our weekly dormitory prayer groups, my classmates would assure me that all Christians struggled with these questions, but the stakes in my case were higher because I was planning to join the mission field after graduation. I nodded deferentially as my friends supplied the familiar apologetics, but afterward, in the silence of my dorm room, I imagined myself evangelizing a citizen of some remote country and crumbling at the moment she pointed out those theological contradictions I myself could not abide or explain.” Through email, you said that two of the central chapters—“Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor”—were especially influential, not just on your faith but your writing.

I’d like to start, if it’s alright with you, with your first reading of the book: who and where you were, what brought you to it, what you remember from those days.

So, I first read the novel when I was a student of theology at Moody Bible Institute, which is this very small, very conservative college in downtown Chicago that's known in certain circles as "The West Point of Christian Service." Basically, everyone who was there, including me, was planning to go into full time ministry. We weren't there for a liberal arts education. But they did offer one literature course for some reason, which I took as an elective. It was about Christian archetypes in Western literature. We read, I think, Graham Greene and a lot of C.S. Lewis, and toward the end of the class, we were assigned these two chapters from The Brothers Karamazov. Taken together, they offer one of the most exhaustive formulations of theodicy—or the problem of evil—in literature. This was, as I mentioned in the n+1 piece, the very problem I was struggling with as a doubting Christian. I felt like Ivan was saying all the things I had thought but had never dared put into words, and he said it with more eloquence and conviction than I could have mustered at the time. 

C.S. Lewis and Graham Greene make perfect sense, but why do you think you were assigned those chapters?

I wondered the same thing initially. It's interesting because when our professor assigned these chapters, she didn't give us any background about Dostoevsky, or the historical context of the novel—nothing. So the first time I read these chapters, I believed that Ivan was the author's mouthpiece and that the book was some kind of atheistic tract. I was actually kind of shocked that they were having us read this kind of blasphemy at Bible school. It didn't occur to me that Dostoevsky was a Christian because I didn't imagine that a Christian could have written such a profound indictment of divine justice. As it happens, I read many years later that Dostoevsky himself worried he'd made Ivan's argument against God more powerful than the Christian response. The response, at the end of these chapters, is the kiss that Christ gives the Grand Inquisitor, which is supposed to represent active love and faith in the Christian mysteries, and is meant as a kind of antidote to Ivan's argument, which rests entirely on reason and logic. So in the end, it is ultimately a defense of Christian faith—and that seems to be why we were assigned these chapters at Bible school. But when I first read these chapters, the kiss seemed so much less powerful than Ivan's argument. I thought it was a cop-out. I've kind of come to see that moment differently over the years, but at the time it just seemed like a totally unsatisfactory answer. 

Do you think—and I assume this is a question you've asked yourself many times of the years—there was an inherent difference between you and your classmates who read this passage and continued with their faith intact? That is—and maybe this is a slightly different question—do you think you would have diverged from Christianity regardless of whether you read those chapters?

Yeah, that's definitely something I've thought about. This book is such a hologram for readers—people see it differently depending on their positions on faith. I've had friends who claimed it brought them back to Christianity after a period of doubt. Other people, like me, cite it as the impetus for their deconversion. So I think the book—probably like many of the best novels—has the capacity to mirror back to us our own desires, and in some cases bring those desire to the surface. I do think I would have diverged from Christianity regardless of whether or not I encountered this book, but that's something I've only been able to admit to myself more recently—that maybe my reasons weren't totally rooted in these theological arguments, but stemmed from something more inchoate. It's interesting because the book itself is largely about this tension between reason and emotion, and these chapters in particular make the case, I think, that reason and emotion are two discrete forms of reality that function on their own terms. People don't believe or disbelieve in religion—or anything, really—for purely rational reasons. We often choose our beliefs based on emotional motivations, and the rational justifications come after the fact. I think this was the case for me. By the time I left Bible school, I had this whole barricade of rational arguments for why I couldn't believe in God, but the truth is that I wanted out, and I found a way out through this book. 

And of course emotional decisions (even the way you phrase it, "wanted out") are born from very human experiences, jiving with or bring repulsed from the conditions around you. Do you think your own wanting out had to do with the brand of Christianity you were raised with, or do you think there was a looser variety that could've kept you on board? (The same week “Ghost in the Cloud” was published, The New Yorker came out with a piece by Joshua Rothman about Rod Dreher and “The Benedict Option”, a call for Christians to embrace exile and seclusion, forming a counterculture all their own. His vision, which somehow seems at once progressive and atavistic, comes to mind, as I've since wondered how my own spirituality would've grown under such radical conditions.)

Yeah, I do think my experience with Christianity had a lot to do with the particulars of the sect and the theological tradition I was raised in, which was fundamentalism—though we never used that word. I think one of the things that was really pernicious about my upbringing was that the version of faith I was presented with was always cast as mainstream or orthodox, and it wasn't until years after I abandoned my faith that I realized there were these much broader, more liberal theological traditions, and that within the spectrum of Christianity, the stuff I was exposed to was actually kind of fringe. Most of my friends who've stayed in the church have actually drifted toward more of the Dreher brand of Christianity. There's this new interest among younger Christians in mainline practices like the liturgy and ritual, which is probably a backlash against the megachurch culture of the 1990s. 

The Brothers Karamazov, you said to me, didn't just give shape to your faith, but your writing as well. You said that Ivan said "all the things I had thought but had never dared put into words, and he said it with more eloquence and conviction than I could have mustered at the time." It seems then that there were two discrete factors of his writing that may have influenced your own: his sheer expressiveness, but also courage. Is that right?

It's hard to really capture the effect these chapters had on me. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I encountered the text outside a standard liberal arts education, without any of the historical or political context. I imagine that most undergraduates who come to this novel in, say, a survey course, regard it as a product of its time and read Ivan's argument as an indictment of Roman Catholicism or Socialism. I took it at face value, as a philosophical dialogue on free will and divine justice. And I guess the lasting influence this had on me was this belief that literature is something that is alive with ideas—dangerous, daring ideas, in this case—and that a novel was a place where you could encounter two characters discussing, say, the meaning of life, or human nature. I think it's fair to say that this book is one of the reasons I wanted to become a writer, but in a lot of ways it was wildly misleading. It took me a long time to realize that novels had kind of stopped taking up these big metaphysical questions a long time ago. When I started writing, I wanted to write fiction. I ended up in this MFA program where everyone was writing psychological realism, and I was trying to jam all these ideas into my stories, and the effect was really awkward and runic and unwieldy. All of which is to say, I think Dostoevsky is probably the reason why I failed at fiction and ended up gravitating toward personal essays, which are much more conducive to exploring ideas. 

Did you finish your MFA in fiction?

I did, but I spent most of my second year writing essays. I took a nonfiction workshop that year and just felt like something clicked, like the form made more sense to me. I continued writing fiction for my fiction workshops, but most of my creative energy was going into essays for the nonfiction workshop. 

Slightly off topic, but how do you define psychological realism?

I'm not sure about the official definition, so I might be misusing the word, but I've always taken it to mean fiction that is invested in character and a character's motivations. You could argue, on one hand, that Dostoevsky fits perfectly into that definition—he's definitely invested in his characters' psychology, and Freud was inspired by his novels. But in many ways the fiction I was exposed to in workshops was the polar opposite of Dostoevsky. In a lot of contemporary fiction, there's no real mystery about human behavior, and the characters' motivations tend to be very predictable and cast in almost clinically psychological terms. Dostoevsky is arguably invested in psychology and human motivation more than any other author, but his characters are always acting illogically, and out of character. They seem very self-aware of their own motivations and their own self-delusions but there's also a point where the characters cannot account for their own actions, and the novel doesn't endeavor to explain these actions either, at least in psychological terms. 

That's a pretty strong indictment of modern fiction. I agree what you're saying though I think the undercurrent of autofiction deftly avoids that mess—the collapse of author onto protagonist or vice-versa, sidestepping the trappings of prescriptive characters with prescriptive traits doing prescriptive actions. There's also some contemporary fiction that, in texture and tone, is so unlike Dostoevsky, yet, like him, makes no apologies about stuffing big ideas (and small ones too) into fiction. I think of Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond. Do you see yourself ever returning to writing fiction in a sort of reimagined way?

I'm glad you mentioned autofiction. I do think that some of the most exciting fiction writers right now are working in that aesthetic. Earlier this year, I read Rachel Cusk's two latest novels, Outline and Transit. I read them both over the course of two weeks and was so enthralled. Something about it did remind me of Dostoevsky, though I'm not sure I can pin down what it is. There are parts of those novels where it feels like you're reading a work of philosophy. Of course, the characters aren't necessarily discussing large-scale social questions or metaphysical ones, but they're talking in a more intimate way about how they think about life, or their identity, these very intimate but important topics. I don't think I was aware of autofiction when I was still writing fiction—it seems like it only took off after I'd already jumped ship to pursue nonfiction. So maybe this is another instance of bad timing, like how I left Christianity right before these reformers stepped in to solve some of the problems that caused me to leave. I haven't thought much about returning to fiction, though I suppose if I did, it would probably be more in that vein. It seems like autofiction isn't so different from the personal essay, at least in terms of voice and narrative persona.  

So it seems then that the theme of this is circumstance. I've been trying to convince a friend to read Cusk for a while, and she hasn't yet, because she first approached her earlier fiction, which wasn't autofiction—and perhaps her earlier characters have, as you say, motivations that "tend to be very predictable and cast in almost clinically psychological terms"). Fiction or non, what seems to get you going the most has been what brought you the light of Dosteovsky, the transmission of ideas. Your own writing is, unsurprisingly, packed with them, and it strikes me that they differ from other ideas traded in contemporary essays in the same way that your first reading of The Brothers Karamazov probably differed from first readings that were more informed of the historical context; that is, you're not writing on a partisan level, or really a contemporary one. (“Ghost in the Cloud” is grounded in real, contemporary people—Ray Kurzweil, for example, or you—but it felt to me like your narrative was perpetually floating up, off the plane of real people doing real things.) Writing about "big ideas", like you do, rarely breaks into a much larger, mainstream discussion, but is now taken in smaller, political bites. Am I talking nonsense? If I'm not, why do you think that happens?

No, that makes sense to me. The first essays I wrote were actually indictments of the church. In retrospect, I'm kind of shocked that they got published in secular venues because they weren't really part of any larger cultural or political debate. I wrote a piece, for example, about the Christian music industry and how it was pandering to teenagers, and I wrote another piece about how pastors had stopped talking about Hell. The readers who responded most enthusiastically to those essays were Christians who actually agreed with the arguments I was making. I do feel like part of me is still stuck in these debates that were formative to me when I was leaving Christianity. And those ideas are still a big part of my writing, though I feel myself lately drifting away from writing explicitly about the church and focusing more on how Christian and spiritual ideas still wield a subtle influence in the larger culture. The piece on transhumanism does that, I think. I'm interested in how these essentially Christian ideas are sublimated into other political, scientific or technological narratives, which is something I'm really attuned to as a former believer. 

That's a unique perspective, especially to someone of your abilities. I look forward to seeing what work comes from these ideas. We're nearing time, so I'll thank you for yours. It was a pleasure having you on Meghan.

Thanks so much, Andrew. I enjoyed our chat!