It helps to have inspiration from artists. An 18th Century, German landscape painter, Caspar David Friedrich, was a significant influence on the emotional colors of the project. It also sparked a discussion on the deceptive beauty of institutions.

Dan asked me to tell him about CDF.


After Caspar David Friedrich, this shows how a gospel of solace and love is co-opted by an human-made institution. Humans, and their creations, especially institutions, are flawed and corruptable. See Max Weber for more on organizational theory. And, like the paintings of CDF's cloisters, the divine nature envelopes them in the end.

This brought on a story about an institution.





One of the themes addressed "the deceptive beauty of institutions." Pictured above is a charting of an example institution, where the original leader, (speaking from the left,) radiates a message (note the color blue), the "ediface" that forms the basis of the institution. It could be a corporation, or a government, or a religious group, etc. The black sketch contains three periods that rise and fall, perhaps because of the passing of the original leader, or other stressors on the organization. Meanwhile, the orange sketch reflects the increasing intensity of "pain," as the institution becomes rigid or beaucratic or totalitarian, etc. (Don't mistake the orientation of the orange graph, as it appears to decline. It is actually inverted because it was drawn as a reflection from the above graph.)

In the text, Ivan's thesis argues a corruption of the Roman Catholic Church due to figureheads such as the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor having accepted the three powers (mystery, miracle, authority) from the "dreaded spirit of self destruction and annihilation." It must be understood that Dostoyevsky, despite his tortured intellectual mind, was a deeply spiritual Christian. From what I've read in Terras' A Karamazov Companion*, the Russian author was known to be observant of fatal flaws in institutions due to the sinful inclination of human beings. I've interpreted this sinful inclination to mirror that of the "dreaded spirit," as both the devil and human are separate from God, and from this painful state of separation arises the self-centered impulses of greed and lust for power over others.

It is also worth mentioning Max Weber, a 19th Century German sociologist, well known for his thesis The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). He struggled and failed to reconcile how a rational institution, whether it be a State or a religious body, as long as it is heirachical and bureaucratic, tends toward the subjugation of the individual for the greater good of all. From here we may have seemingly great republics, but we have also unleashed totalitarian regimes engaged in "resplendent autos-da-fe," to "burn the wicked heretics."

In the story that the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ, His Word was the "ediface," the foundation on which the Church was formed; it became an institution to propagate His Word; a mission to spread the Gospel. But the Grand Inquisitor, along with "the clever people," "corrected His great deed," and this was Dostoyevsky's point of contention. Since Dostoyevsky was of the Orthodox, not Catholic, Christian faith, it is also worth mentioning an anecdote on the scism of the Church (which I mistakenly referred to as "council of Nicaea," which is something else entirely).