In this book Paul Contino offers a theological study of Dostoevsky's final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. He argues that incarnational realism animates the vision of the novel, and the decisions and actions of its hero, Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov. The book takes a close look at Alyosha's mentor, the Elder Zosima, and the way his role as a confessor and his vision of responsibility «to all, for all» develops and influences Alyosha. The remainder of the study, which serves as a kind of reader's guide to the novel, follows Alyosha as he takes up the mantle of his elder, develops as a «monk in the world,» and, at the end of three days, ascends in his vision of Cana. The study attends also to Alyosha's brothers and his ministry to them: Mitya's struggle to become a «new man» and Ivan's anguished groping toward responsibility. Finally, Contino traces Alyosha's generative role with the young people he encounters, and his final message of hope.
Оглавление
Paul J. Contino. Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism
Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
The Brothers Karamazov as Transformational Classic
The Analogical Imagination and Incarnational Realism
Beauty and Re-formation
The Elder Zosima
Alyosha’s First Three Days
Mitya
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov
Alyosha’s Three Days in November
Alyosha, His Life and Afterlives
Testimony from an Array of Catholic Readers of The Brothers Karamazov
Names in The Brothers Karamazov
Endnotes
Bibliography
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Finding Christ among the Karamazovs
Paul J. Contino
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These “tiny indications,” sown with “seeds from different worlds” (276), can be found in quotidian life. As Pieper observes, the saints are those who understand this most clearly: “We would . . . remind our readers how intensely the great saints loved the ordinary and commonplace, and how anxious they were lest they might have been deceived into regarding their own hidden craving for the ‘extraordinary’ as a ‘counsel’ of the Holy Spirit of God” (Cardinal 39). The ego-ridden ascetic Ferapont craves the extraordinary: his mushroom diet elicits hallucinatory distortions of reality. He condemns Zosima for enjoying cherry jam, and for prescribing a laxative when a brother monk sees devils. Saint Zosima provides a model of sensible, faithful prudence.
Prudence fosters hope in a transcendent telos, a pilgrim’s vision of slow, quotidian progress toward union with Love in heaven. In the West, we may call this communal beatitude or the beatific vision;68 in the East theosis or deification. Persons are called to sanctification in this life and “Godmanhood” in the next. “Man, according to St. Basil, is a creature who has received a commandment to become God. But this commandment is addressed to human freedom, and does not overrule it. As a personal being man can accept the will of God; he can also reject it” (Lossky 124). In The Brothers Karamazov, characters de-form themselves through laceration (nadryv) and assertion of autonomous “man-godhood.” Ivan’s youthful writing evokes Nietzsche’s valorization of the übermensch:69 “Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear” (546). The assertion of man-godhood—with its consequent denial of the personhood of others—proves infernal. But “paradise” remains the alternative, and not only in its ultimate form of theosis, but in the analogical joys experienced here and now: “life is a paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won’t see it, if we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day” (249). Here Zosima’s dying brother Markel articulates his experience of joy, as do Mikhail (268), Alyosha (311), Mitya (429), and Kolya and the boys (646). But their taste of the infinite is preceded by an incarnational descent into finitude.
