Читать книгу Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism - Paul J. Contino - Страница 10

Dostoevsky sought to portray the “person in the person.” His “higher realism,” rooted in his Christian faith, sees visible, finite reality as bearing an analogical relationship to an invisible, infinite reality. An analogical imagination recognizes that human persons are creatures, both like and radically unlike their Creator. Created in God’s image, persons are like God in their rationality, freedom, and capacity to create and love. But God is one and persons are many; God is unchanging and persons are mutable; God is infinite and persons are finite. Above all, persons are dependent as their existence is contingent upon God’s. God is not simply another being, but Being itself, the One in Whom all persons live and move and have their particular beings.11 Our existence as beings does not place us in the same ontological category as God. But the divine is not so utterly transcendent that our own rational conceptions of the good and true and beautiful bear no relation to God.12 They bear an analogical relation.

Christian faith understands God not only as Being but as Love. God is a unity of three persons bound in infinite, inter-relational, self-giving love. God’s love overflows to form creation and, in time, enters history and a particular place in the person of Christ. In Christ, the believer sees most clearly the image of God’s beauty, goodness, and truth. The infinite Word takes on creaturely flesh and finitude. But Christ’s descent into finitude and death brings forth resurrection, ascension, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. As Trinity, God is both One and three differentiated persons; Christ is both God and man, “without confusion . . . without separation.”13 The analogical imagination is built upon the two doctrinal beams that undergird the Christian faith: Trinity and Incarnation. Analogy recognizes the unity in our human plurality: for all our particularity and diversity, we are each persons, and, in analogy to God’s trinitarian nature, created to be in integral relation to other persons. Analogy recognizes that human love is both like and—given our creaturely, fallen frailty—unlike the Creator’s love.14

Both like and unlike: a “both/and” approach to reality recognizes both its complexity and wholeness. It resists the temptation to order that complexity with too-tidy “either/or” categorizations.15 Dostoevsky’s novel represents reality as both graced gift and arduous task; the world as both sacramentally charged and sinfully fallen; paradise as both here and yet to come; persons as both open in their freedom to change and closed given the realities of time, interpersonal commitment, consequences of past actions, and even genetic inheritance. Dostoevsky depicts the human desire for holiness as demanding both willing receptivity and a willed (but never willful) effort of self-denial.16

A both/and vision should not be understood as resulting in static indecision. Rather, it fosters a prudential appreciation of particularity that, in time, necessitates decisive action. Taking one road precludes taking another. Thus, the novel’s “both/and” vision recognizes that “either/or” moments are inevitable in human experience, and require the preparatory work of discernment. Having reached a clear apprehension of the truth of a particular situation, each character in the novel must decide and act. Rather than depleting personhood by foreclosing options, decisive action enhances it. Wholeness is found in the passage through the limited. Grace remains ever available in the place of fragmentation. As St. Thomas Aquinas emphasized, uncreated grace builds upon created nature;17 infinite freedom fosters finite, creatural freedom. Freedom exercised in “active love” is grounded in the person’s “precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world” (276).

Active love itself has a both/and form: it integrates both human inclination, our attraction to the good and beautiful (eros) and sacrificial self-emptying on behalf of others (agape). Persons are called to participate in the divine self-emptying, the kenosis of “perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of [their] neighbor” (54), in acts of self-transcendence not of self-obliteration.18 Dostoevsky distinguishes the relational person from the autonomous self: “For Dostoevsky, it is a bad thing to lose one’s personality, but a good thing to lose one’s self” (Corrigan 12). Paradoxically, he affirms that fullness of personhood—one’s “true self”—emerges only through the gift of self. In this way, Dostoevsky’s vision bears deep affinities to those of St. Augustine and Dante Alighieri—two other Christian “classics” to whom I will sometimes refer in this study. For all three writers, eros and agape find a “hidden wholeness”19 in the practice of caritas. “Except a corn of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). Jesus spoke these words as he entered Jerusalem, and into his passion, death, and resurrection. The words comprise the novel’s epigraph and suggest its recurring theme. The epigraph presents a seminal image of both finitude and fruition. It suggests that self-giving love, in response to God’s own, is the human person’s deepest desire.20

To reiterate, a both/and vision must include the reality of a decisive “either/or.”21 “See, I have today set before you life and good, death and evil” (Deut 30:15). Moses presents here a stark either/or, and in its similarly high-stakes choice between life and death the novel is both “both/and” and “either/or.” Paradoxically—and aptly—the cross becomes “the tree of life” “the roots” of which lie in the “other world” (276). The cross stands as the novel’s symbol for that which “brings forth much fruit.”22 Its counter image is the gallows, chosen by the suicide. The night before the trial, Ivan vows to Alyosha: “Tomorrow the cross, but not the gallows” (549). This “either/or” is decisive. But even the tiniest of charitable deeds can re-direct and re-align a person to the form of Christ: the gift of a kiss, a pillow, or a “pound of nuts” that open an orphaned child’s eyes to the hidden ground of Trinitarian love (567–68). A gratuitously offered “little onion” (307, 311) can be salvific.23

Given Dostoevsky’s radically inclusive vision of salvation “for all,” what of those who choose the gallows? Does Smerdyakov have his onion? Here too we find complexity: the novel complicates any quick condemnation of those who, like Smerdyakov (or Judas, his scriptural prototype), choose suicide. In the Gospel of Matthew, Judas “deeply regret[s] what he had done.” He returns the thirty pieces of silver and confesses. Only after being rebuffed by the priests does he commit suicide (Matt 27:3–5).24 Similarly, on the night before the trial, when Smerdyakov describes his murder to Ivan and hands him the blood money, the narrator admits that “It was impossible to tell if it was remorse he was feeling, or what” (529). Both tragic images complicate the reader’s overly hasty judgment, as does Zosima’s meditation which emphasizes both justice and mercy:

But woe to those who have slain themselves on earth, woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. They tell us that it is a sin to pray to God for them and outwardly the Church, as it were, renounces them, but in my secret heart I believe that we may pray even for them. Love can never be an offense to Christ. For such as those I have prayed inwardly all my life, I confess it, fathers and teachers, and even now I pray for them every day. (279)

The reader, implicated, is called to “go and do likewise.” In Zosima’s vision, and that of the novel as a whole, God’s love and the possibility of redemption extends even into hell, where God continues to call souls (279) and angels offer onions (303). “God wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:3–4); Zosima fulfills the Christian “obligation to hope for the salvation of all.”25

Dostoevsky sees like both a fox and a hedgehog: he perceives diverse particulars, but also their participation in a deeper “living unity.”26 His analogical vision of reality fosters clear-eyed hope left unavailable by an imagination that is univocal or equivocal.27 The univocal imagination forces unity where it doesn’t exist. Recoiling from disorder, it imposes a totalizing and unblessed rage for order. Its political form is totalitarianism: the Grand Inquisitor annihilates human freedom in the name of “love [of] mankind” (223). In its interpersonal form, the univocal distorts reality by seeing the world in rigid, reified binaries: something or someone is either wholly good or wholly bad, either saved or damned. In a despotic insistence on sameness, the univocal rejects the mixed, messy, and imperfect. It elides the finite realities of time and place. It ignores the partial and particular by projecting a constructed ideal upon the real.28 It’s impervious to surprise. In the novel, the univocal takes various forms, inevitably absurd, such as Ferapont’s hallucinatory asceticism, Katerina’s lacerating “self-sacrifice,” or Madame Khokhlakova’s “love in dreams.”

But here too complexity arises: even “love in dreams” can’t be too simply opposed to “active love.” It can’t be reduced to a negative in a neat Manichean binary, demonically defended as an “indispensable minus” (545).29 Madame Khokhlakova fantasizes about “becoming a sister of mercy,” but Zosima cannily (and comically) detects a grain of good in her dreams: “‘It is much, and well that your mind is full of such dreams and not others. Sometime, unawares, you might do a good deed in reality’” (54). Some fantasies are better than others; Ivan’s wish for his father’s death corrodes his capacity for commitment. Contemporary psychologists corroborate Zosima’s insight: contemplating a change is the first step in the process of change.30

But finally, after prudentially reaching a decision, one must act. As Zosima makes clear, if an overweening desire for others’ “approbation” takes precedence over integrally made decisions, one’s “whole life will slip away like a phantom” (55).31 The Grand Inquisitor reveals the destruction wrought by the univocal: his proclaimed “love of humankind” masks his contempt for persons, and his inclination to annihilate them. His demonic dehumanization foreshadows the totalitarian horrors of recent history. In Zosima’s (and Dostoevsky’s) imagination, hell is the refusal to love. In both this world and the next, hell has an exit, but as an existential condition remains a real option. Some refuse the way out, and for them “hell is voluntary” (279).32 The univocal imagination can lead to such hell.

The equivocal imagination is similarly infernal. It distorts the real by seeing in it nothing but intractable difference. Rather than imposing a false unity, the equivocal imagination relishes the mess, with a perverse amalgam of willful jouissance and Sartrean nausea. It rejects the unity, wholeness, and harmony that are given, but that also emerge out of the slow work of active love. Ethically, equivocation rejects the ordinary bonds that comprise human personhood: responsibilities to family, friends, and the common good. In the novel, Ivan and the illegitimate, unacknowledged fourth brother, Smerdyakov, exemplify equivocation. Ivan articulates the nihilistic vision (65) and Smerdyakov enacts it (531): “if there is no immortality [i.e. heaven, theosis, the telos of communal beatitude], there is no immorality. Everything is permitted” (65; emphasis added). In the novel, the equivocal imagination produces a “love of disorder,” motivated by willful, irrational self-assertion. Ivan and Smerdyakov, the younger Grushenka, Katerina, and Lisa melodramatically luxuriate in lacerating both themselves and others. They thus oppose the incarnational work of active love.

Janus-faced, the univocal and equivocal imaginations comprise a refusal of reality. By rejecting the ontological reality of the “hidden ground of love,” both reject unity within diversity. In place of that ontology they assert an epistemology that projects upon and cuts “against the grain” (545) of the real.33 The univocal compels order; the equivocal exacerbates disorder. Both reject reality as grounded in God’s self-giving love. Both choose “the gallows”: violence toward others and self.34

The “analogy of being” has been described as the “fundamental Catholic form” (Przywara 348). As a lifelong Catholic, I’m aware that my partiality to the novel’s analogical dimension stems partly from my rootedness in that tradition.35 The many forms of Catholicism—liturgical, doctrinal, cultural, intellectual—in-form my reading of Dostoevsky’s novel. As Appendix I illustrates, a wide array of notable Catholic writers have deeply resonated with Dostoevsky’s novels. Of course, the Russian novelist (and nationalist) wrote withering critiques of both Catholicism and Protestantism. Dostoevsky believed that through the truth of Orthodoxy “the star [would] arise in the East” (62) and save the world.36 I approach Dostoevsky’s classic with a degree of readerly “outsideness” and hermeneutic “prejudice.” But as Bakhtin and Gadamer suggest, such a readerly position can be hermeneutically fruitful.37 Furthermore, Catholicism and Orthodoxy share a sacramental tradition and an understanding that analogy entails both likeness and even greater unlikeness.38 In both their cataphatic and apophatic forms, Orthodoxy and Catholicism evince the incarnational realism I emphasize in my reading of the novel.

Incarnational Realism

“Realism” is a word with a complex literary, philosophical, and theological valence to which I cannot do justice here. Suffice it to say “incarnational realism” refers not only to the late-nineteenth-century literary genre in which Dostoevsky writes, but to his philosophical/theological belief that the human mind is capable of apprehending the world as it is ontologically, even with our epistemological limitations and inheritance of “social constructions.” As literary scholar Susan Felch writes, the world outside of us “impinges upon us and sets limits to our ways of seeing, being, and acting in the world” (25). And we are ourselves limited by our particularity of perspectives; thus Susan’s term, “perspectival realism.” Realism must be “critical”; theologian N. T. Wright defines “critical realism” as: “a way of acknowledging the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the thing known as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’) while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality is through the spiraling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence ‘critical’)” (35). And, here, in part, is sociologist Christian Smith’s description:

Critical realism’s central organizing thought is that much of reality exists independently of human consciousness of it; . . . that humans can acquire a truthful though fallible knowledge and understanding of reality through various forms of disciplined conceptualization, inquiry, and theoretical reflection . . . [and] that knowledge and understanding of the truths about reality position knowers to critically engage the world in normative, prescriptive, and even moral terms . . . and [to] intentionally try to shape the world for the better. (92–93)39

Ethically, realism entails the indispensable practice of prudence. Through prudence we become more discerning, more responsible. By degrees, we become better able to receptively apprehend and respond to the real.40 In ordinary parlance, we aim to “be realistic.” Aware of human limits, we set practical, attainable goals—and (when it’s prudent to do so!) implore those whom we care about to “get real.” Consider Zosima’s practical advice to Fyodor: “If you can’t close all [your taverns], at least two or three” (43; emphasis added). You have to start somewhere. And for Dostoevsky, God’s grace, which sustains reality itself, gives us the strength to begin again, to apprehend and respond to divine love. Moments after counseling Fyodor, Zosima exhorts a woman in despair to have faith, to know “that God loves you as you cannot conceive, that He loves you with your sin, in your sin” (50).

Textual examples such as these help clarify Dostoevsky’s vision of incarnational realism. In this chapter I’ll present three passages from The Brothers Karamazov in the hope of providing a clearer sense of what Dostoevsky meant when he insisted “I am only a realist in a higher sense, i.e., I depict all the depths of the human soul.”41 Dostoevsky portrays the depths of human personhood, and envisions creation in the light of “incarnational realism.”

The first passage is from Book 6, which records teachings of the Elder Zosima spoken in “a last effort of love” (248). Read in full, this passage offers “what is probably the master key to the philosophical interpretation, as well as to the structure, of The Brothers Karamazov” (Terras, Companion 259).42 As a whole, Dostoevsky’s novel gives narrative embodiment—word made flesh—to the vision articulated by Zosima.43 Heard as a symphonic whole, the novel renders reality as “being as communion,”44 “the coinherence of creation with God and of creatures with one another” (Barron 145). More simply, the novel offers a practical spirituality to anyone who senses this “coinherence,”45 and desires to respond to it with the gritty work of active love. Here are Zosima’s words:

My friends, pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of heaven. And let not the sin of men confound you in your doings. Fear not that it will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished. Do not say, “Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and we are lonely and helpless, and evil environment is wearing us away and hindering our good work from being done.” Fly from that dejection, children! There is only one means of salvation, then take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men’s sins, that is the truth, you know, friends, for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for all men, you will see at once that it is really so, and that you are to blame for everyone and for all things. But throwing your own indolence and impotence on others you will end by sharing the pride of Satan and murmuring against God. Of the pride of Satan what I think is this: it is hard for us on earth to comprehend it, and therefore it is so easy to fall into error and to share it, even imagining that we are doing something grand and fine. Indeed many of the strongest feelings and movements of our nature we cannot comprehend on earth. Let that not be a stumbling block, and think not that it may serve as a justification to you for anything. For the Eternal Judge asks of you what you can comprehend and not what you cannot. You will know yourself hereafter, for you will behold all things truly then and will not dispute them. On earth, indeed, we are as it were astray, and if it were not for the precious image of Christ before us, we should be undone and altogether lost, as was the human race before the flood. Much on earth is hidden from us, but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot apprehend the reality of things on earth. God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up, but what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think. (276; emphasis added)

While he acknowledges that “much is hidden,” Zosima affirms that we can apprehend “the reality of things on earth” by sustaining “a precious mystic sense of our living bond with . . . the higher heavenly world,” the seeds of which have been sown in creation. Christ’s incarnation follows the creation: “The Word” (whom Ivan resists [203]) “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Thus “the precious image of Christ”46 re-sacralizes reality and remains present in the church, the body of Christ—in its unlikely saints, and in the ecclesial forms of word, sacrament, and icon.

Some Orthodox critics, such as Sergei Hackel, have found the novel to be insufficiently ecclesial. Closer examination suggests otherwise. For example, Zosima recalls attending the Divine Liturgy at the age of eight. During Holy Week, he sees sunlight streaming through “the narrow little window,” and “consciously received the seed of God’s word in [his] heart” (255). Decades later and near death, Zosima longs for the sacraments: “he desired to confess and take communion at once” and then receives extreme unction (145). The church reflects and mediates the precious image of Christ, and Zosima recognizes Christ as the grain of wheat that has fallen to bring forth much fruit (John 12:24). Divine love sows (Matt 13:18–23) “seeds from other worlds” that sustain persons’ participation in Christ’s pattern of descent and ascent. In cooperative effort, through the work of love grounded in grace, they too bring forth much fruit (John 15:8).

Christ’s “precious image” propels its beholder into active participation in what theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar calls the “theodrama” in which the Creator’s infinite freedom fosters the finite freedom of God’s beloved creatures. God’s sustaining presence provides the warrant for persevering in the work of responsible active love. As Augustine emphasized, love builds on humility. It accepts epistemological and other limits, and rejects the defensive impulse to justify self, blame the world, and thus share the “pride of Satan.” Through experience, a person learns to discern reality more clearly, to respond appropriately (“Know measure, know the proper time, study that” [279]),47 and to do so decisively (“If you remember in the night as you go to sleep ‘I have not done what I ought to have done,’ rise up at once and do it” [277]). However one interprets the contours of reality at any particular time, the real remains founded upon what Thomas Merton called the “hidden ground of love.”48 Our “roots” lie here, in worlds Zosima describes as “heavenly,” “higher,” and “mysterious” (276).

Zosima’s realism attends to both the limits and graces found in quotidian life. Finitude curbs the pilgrim’s rough path to eternity. By accepting responsibility in our particular time, place, and community, we discern glimpses of transcendent beauty, of “paradise” (249), often unexpectedly. Zosima articulates a both/and eschatology: paradise is both here and yet to arrive. Faith in eternal beatitude incorporates a vision of life’s goodness, here and now. Incarnational realism suspects the romantic, utopian, sentimental, and apocalyptic.49 It not only “confesses the reality of the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ” (Moore 9), but sees all beings as participating in the integral realities of Trinity and Incarnation.

The second passage to which I will point occurs early in the novel, as the narrator introduces Alyosha as a “realist.” Holding up the apostle Thomas, he suggests that Alyosha’s realism not only accepts miracles, but that it’s integrally related to his faith in Christ’s resurrection:

Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh, no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. . . . Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle, but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe until he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, “I shall not believe except I see.” (28)

For Thomas, as for Alyosha, beholding Christ’s risen image fosters an already-present faith in the Word made flesh.50 Faith grounds incarnational realism: Thomas can see the physical and spiritual reality of the risen Christ because he believes. So too Alyosha who thus counters the “unbelieving realism” of Rakitin. Egotism blinds Rakitin to the genuine spiritual transformations, “resurrections” of others.51 His materialism52 reduces human freedom to the chemical reactions of nerve cells (497).53 At the end of the catalytic “Onion” chapter, in which Alyosha and Grushenka image Christ for each other, Rakitin sneeringly calls their encounter a “miracle” (308). In fact, it is. Faith lends vision to believers like Zosima, Alyosha, Mitya, Grushenka and others, giving them the “ability to see what God chooses to show and which cannot be seen without faith” (von Balthasar, Form 175).

Of course, the life of faith is not free of doubt. Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that one of the most “pure and profound examples of confessional self-accounting . . . may be found” in the prayer of the father with the possessed child who “said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief” (Mark 9:24) (Author 145).54 Given the crucible through which he passed, Dostoevsky understood this father’s prayer. Most believers do. But as James P. Scanlan observes, while Dostoevsky doubted, he never actively disbelieved.55 Like Thomas, Dostoevsky believed in his “secret heart.” His faith enabled him to see the reality of human participation in the death and resurrection of Christ, which he invokes in the novel’s final pages and elsewhere.56

In the narrator’s “midrash” on John 20, Thomas’s beholding of the risen Christ fosters Thomas’s faith, but he sees because he believes. So too Alyosha: he discerns the spiritual dimension of reality in ways that the materialist Rakitin refuses. As do others in the novel, Alyosha speaks of having been “risen up,” as when he declares to Grushenka, “You’ve raised my soul from the depths” (302). The imprisoned Mitya avows that “a new man has risen up in me” (499). Rakitin witnesses the “resurrections” of both Alyosha and Mitya, but disbelief blinds him to the miracle embodied in both. Rakitin is unwilling to open himself to any gracious surprise that may exist outside his egocentric consciousness. He is a rationalist, a “theoretician.” Victor Terras elucidates: “A ‘realist’ according to Dostoevsky is a person who lives and thinks in terms of immediately, or intuitively, given reality. The opposite, then, is the ‘theoretician’ (teoretik), who seeks to create and to realize a subjective world of his own” (Companion 137).

In Thomist terms, the realist’s attunement to “given reality” enables a capacity for prudential action. Josef Pieper writes: “Reality is the basis of the good, . . . to be good is to do justice to objective being” (“Reality” 112); prudence “is the proper disposition of the practical reason insofar as it knows what is to be done concretely in the matter of ways and means” (163). Prudence attends to the context of “particular realities and circumstances which ‘surround’ every individual moral action” (166). Through experience, a prudent person learns to apprehend reality more clearly, and to respond more decisively.

Without prudence, a person cannot act virtuously, cannot flourish. Rather than egocentrically projecting a predetermined schema upon reality, prudence remains receptively open to reality. Aristotle’s discussion of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics is seminal: “prudence is a state grasping the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about things that are good or bad for a human being”; prudence “is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it”; prudence entails “deliberation . . . that accords with what is beneficial, about the right thing, in the right way, and at the right time”; finally, prudence is “the eye of the soul, [and] requires virtue in order to reach its fully developed state; . . . full virtue cannot be acquired without prudence” (1140b–1144b). Pieper says that for St. Thomas, who reads Aristotle through the eyes of faith, “‘reason’ means . . . nothing other than ‘regard for and openness to reality,’ and ‘acceptance of reality.’ And ‘truth’ is to him nothing other than the unveiling and revelation of reality, of both natural and supernatural reality” (Cardinal 9). Pieper defines prudence as “the perfected ability to make decisions in accordance with reality [and] . . . the quintessence of ethical maturity” (Cardinal 31). Fellow Thomist Jacques Maritain, citing Claude Tresmontant, emphasizes the realism inherent in practical reason: “[I]f reason is not constituted a priori, if the principles belonging to reason are in fact drawn from the real itself through our knowledge of the real, then one need hardly be astonished if there is accord between reason and the real. . . . Rationality is not an order or a structure constituted a priori, but a relation between the human mind and the real . . .” (Peasant 109).57

Practical reason attends to “the rough ground,”58 the gritty textures of everyday reality and the graces to be found there. Upon first impression, Dostoevsky’s intensely emotional characters don’t seem to be characterized by “reason.” His great biographer Joseph Frank claims that during the time he wrote The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky saw as “central” “the conflict between reason and faith—faith now being understood very sharply as the irrational core of the Christian commitment” (Prophet 570).59 For Frank, Dostoevsky’s understanding of Christian hope was “justified by nothing but what Kierkegaard called a ‘leap of faith’ in the radiant image of Christ the Godman” (A Writer in His Time 859). But for all the existential anguish of his characters, I see Dostoevsky’s vision—and most fully so in his final novel—as bearing a deeper affinity to Thomas Aquinas’s emphasis on practical wisdom forged in communal relations than to Kierkegaard’s stress on absurdity and subjectivity. At least in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard praises an image of faith that suspends the ethical and remains incommunicable to others: when Abraham sets out to journey to Mount Moriah with Isaac, he cannot tell Sarah of his plans. Nor (Kierkegaard would argue) can he tell her what happened there when he returns home.60 In contrast, The Brothers Karamazov emphasizes a grace-infused yet communicable ethic of active love. The practice of active love itself fosters faith, and those who extend it to each other experience mutual comprehension. Certainly the novel has its apophatic dimension: no orthodox understanding of Christian faith can lack it.61 But the apophatic—which emphasizes God’s transcendence by naming what God is not—is consistent with an understanding of analogy that affirms both similarity and dissimilarity between creature and Creator. As David Bentley Hart notes:

[A]ll the major theistic traditions insist at some point that our language about God consists mostly in conceptual restrictions and fruitful negations. “Cataphatic” (or affirmative) theology must always be chastened and corrected by “apophatic” (or negative) theology. We cannot speak of God in his own nature directly but at best only analogously, and even then only in such a way that the conceptual content of our analogies consists largely in our knowledge of all the things God is not. (Experience 142)

Dostoevsky is always alert to the apophatic, as some of his best commentators have elucidated.62 Yet The Brothers Karamazov’s cataphatic dimension consistently demonstrates the human capacity to discern God’s will and to communicate it to others. Zosima’s counsel to his fellow monks is consistently realistic and reasonable. Even when young, Dostoevsky insisted that he saw “nothing more reasonable” than Christ.63 Consistently, he rejected rationalism—the “rational egoism” of his contemporary Chernyshevsky64 and the positivism of Rakitin—as a de-formation of reason that dissolves the freedom of persons as images of God.65 Freedom entails the practice of virtue, most prominently, active love, and, as A. Boyce Gibson understatedly noted almost fifty years ago, “the faith displayed in ‘active love’ is not so far from being ‘reasonable’” (211).66 The Brothers Karamazov presents active love as graced, reasonable, and possible.

Dostoevsky’s conception of faith cannot be reduced to an act of emotional will, a voluntaristic “leap.” Voluntarism exalts the human will, and in Dostoevsky’s world the unfettered, irrational will leads to demonic violence and un-freedom. Aware of impinging limits, incarnational realism fosters freedom in its uniting of “reason and will, knowledge and love in the act of choice. This places the image of God in the power humans have to act on their own, in mastery and moral responsibility” (Pinckaers 137). Zosima and Alyosha gradually and rationally arrive at the maturity of prudence through their abiding faith in the “precious image of Christ.” Their faith is animated by what Dostoevsky’s contemporary St. John Henry Newman called “the illative sense.” “The term first appears in The Grammar of Assent where Newman describes the illative sense as an intellectual analogue to phronesis. The ‘illative sense’ . . . describes the day-to-day ability of the mind to gather together many small pieces of evidence into a grand conclusion that is not strictly warranted by logical criteria” (Kaplan and Coolman 624). Aidan Nichols describes the illative sense as “the heaping together of tiny indications, none of which by itself is conclusive, [but which] produces certitude in ordinary human affairs” (Kaplan and Coolman 624).67

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.

Descent and Ascent

In Dostoevsky’s novel, paradisal joy emerges after a Christic passage into the suffering intrinsic to our free yet finite, creatural existence. The practice of active love is “harsh and dreadful” (55), and entails a Christic passage of descent and ascent. As William F. Lynch writes, “the great fact of Christology, that Christ moved down into all the realities of man to get to his Father” (Christ and Apollo 13). Lynch briefly traces this passage in Alyosha’s experience after Zosima’s death, but readers can discern its recurring pattern in the lives of each major character in the novel.

The descent/ascent pattern provides the form for two other great Christian narratives of conversion and confession: Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Commedia.70 In the Milan garden, Augustine tearfully falls to the ground and hears a child’s sing-song voice repeat “Pick up and read.” He reads the words of St. Paul, and rises up a new man. Dante, with the graced guidance of Virgil, descends into hell and a deeper awareness of his self-imprisoning sin. With Virgil’s help, he climbs Mount Purgatory. At its apex, he meets his confessor, Beatrice, before whom, weeping, he takes responsibility for his sin. Washed clean, he is prepared for his ascent into the beatific vision of paradise.

In Dante’s “poetics of conversion” “the need for another’s guidance and for a descent into humility” are crucial; “Augustine’s Confessions provides the model and supreme analogue” (Freccero xii). The Confessions enact both a confession of faith and confession of sin. Similarly, Dante the pilgrim’s confession before Beatrice bears fruit in Dante the poet’s concluding hymn of praise for “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” (Par. 33). Dante’s confession comprises the crux of his journey out of the dark wood. As von Balthasar observes, “The confession scene is not just an episode in the Comedy; it is the dynamic goal of the whole journey. And yet it is just as much the point of departure for Paradise” (Glory III, Lay Styles 61). The Brothers Karamazov presents a “prosaics of conversion” in which confession to Zosima or Alyosha prove crucial in character’s incarnational passage of descent and ascent. Christ’s incarnation is central to the imagination of all three writers. Like Augustine and Dante, Dostoevsky sees Christ as both human and divine, and as the incarnate model to which every human life is called to conform. Near the end of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor posits a potent imperative: “we have to struggle to recover a sense of what the Incarnation means” (754). Part of that project of recovery entails an awareness of those medieval sources in which Christ’s incarnation is understood as pivotal. Dostoevsky’s novel retrieves this “old Christian realism” (Auerbach, Mimesis 521).71

A pictorial analogue may be found in the quattrocento Italian art of Giotto, whose fresco series in Padua’s Arena Chapel renders key moments in the life of Christ in homely, embodied form. A few years earlier, he had done much the same in Assisi’s Basilica, depicting the Christ-like life of St. Francis, the “Pater Seraphicus,” whose title Ivan lends to Zosima (230).72

Influenced by Francis’s incarnational spirit, his love of the natural world, Giotto marks the decisive break from the Byzantine tradition of iconic representation practiced for centuries in Italy—gold-laden backgrounds, stylized, transfigured flesh—and an entry into the naturalism of the Renaissance.73

In Giotto’s imagination, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ transforms time and affirms the value of narrative as that which necessarily transpires over time. Discussing Giotto’s friend Dante, John Freccero elucidates a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians in which “Christ is described as ‘the fullness of time’” (267). All that precedes Christ’s incarnation can be understood as figural anticipation of that decisive joining of divine and human. All that proceeds from that event can be understood as its recapitulation.74 The human drama is one of conversion, confession, and virtuous effort, one of descent into humility, penitence and ascent into the practice of active love: the “theodrama” of descent and ascent recapitulates the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

So too does the drama of saints like Zosima and Alyosha (or Sonia, in Crime and Punishment) who serve as confessors for others. In their encounters, each descends and empties himself in kenotic attention to the other. Thus the scriptural figural patterns in the novel observed by many of the novel’s best commentators.75 As Harriet Murav notes, “the basic proposition of Dostoevsky’s novel [is] that human history can be touched by God, that we are not limited to the horizontal time frame. Our world and other worlds converge, to use the language of the novel” (134).

By locating his characters’ stories within the context of the biblical narrative, Dostoevsky follows the “traditional realistic interpretation of the biblical stories” (Frei 1). Hans Frei contrasts realistic reading with two others. The first, “mythological reading,” denies the concrete reality represented in narrative; the second, scientific/historical criticism, reduces Christ solely to his material, finite condition, and severs him from the spiritual, infinite realty also affirmed by the Gospel narratives. “[T]he traditional reading of Scripture” recognizes both spiritual reality and “referred to and described actual historical occurrences.” Scripture thus forms “one cumulative story,” and provides the warrant for interpreting “earlier biblical stories [as] figures or types of later stories and of their events and patterns of meaning.”76 The shape of The Brothers Karamazov, its characters and events, are likewise presented “as figures of [the scriptural] storied world.” Its characters gradually discern its figurative pattern woven into reality, even as the reader—especially upon rereading—hears recurring rhymes and chimes within the world of the novel. Throughout, “the sublime or at least serious effect mingles inextricably with the quality of what is casual, random, ordinary, and everyday” (Frei 14).

Frei draws upon the work of Erich Auerbach, who sees “three historical high points in [realistic narrative’s] development: the Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the nineteenth-century novel” (16), specifically the Russian novel, and especially Dostoevsky’s work:

It seems that the Russians were naturally endowed with the possibility of conceiving of everyday things in a serious vein; that a classicist aesthetics which excludes a literary category of “the low” from serious treatment could never gain a firm foothold in Russia. Then, too, as we think of Russian realism, remembering that it came into its own only during the nineteenth century and indeed only during the second half of it, we cannot escape the observation that it is . . . fundamentally related . . . to the old-Christian than to modern occidental realism. (Mimesis 521; emphasis added)

The Brothers Karamazov retrieves “old Christian realism” for our “secular age.” The novel’s perennial relevance provides one means of “recover[ing] a sense of what the incarnation might mean” (Taylor, Secular 754).

An illustration of this figural descent/ascent pattern can be found in the novel’s first chapter, and comprises my third (long-promised) textual example. The narrator, an ordinary townsperson of Skotoprigonevsk, recalls events that occurred there thirteen years earlier (in about 1867). He introduces Fyodor Pavlovich as “an ill-natured buffoon and nothing more” (3). His tone is insistent and dismissive. But in the final paragraph, as he describes the old man’s reaction to the death of his first wife, he relaxes his judgment:

Fyodor Pavlovich was drunk when he first heard of his wife’s death: they say that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace,” but according to others he wept without restraint like a little child, so much so that it was pitiful to look at him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions are true, that is, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him—both at the same time. In most cases, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too. (13)

By the end, the narrator releases his earlier “finalization” of Fyodor, and suggests, humbly, the limits of his omniscience:77 Fyodor may have both buffoonishly travestied Scripture and wept like the child Christ counselled all to become (Matt 18:3). Humbly, the narrator lets this mystery be.

The humility of this narrative style—which alternates with a more conventionally omniscient one—bears an affinity to patristic Christian realism: the sermo humilis or low style exemplified by St. Augustine, especially his sermons. As Erich Auerbach explains, the low style employs “humble everyday things” (“Sermo” 37) and language to signify the most sublime subjects—God, grace, redemption—and were authorized in doing so by the event of the incarnation. “Humilis is related to humus, the soil, and literally means low, low lying, of small stature” (“Sermo” 39). The word “humilis became the most important adjective characterizing [Christ’s] Incarnation” (40). For the patristic and later monastic literary imagination, “the humility of the Incarnation derives its full force from the contrast with Christ’s divine nature: man and God, lowly and sublime, humilis et sublimis; both the height and the depth are immeasurable and inconceivable . . .” (43). Such a paradoxical combination of sublime subject matter and humble style baffled its contemporary audience: “Most educated pagans regarded the early Christian writings as ludicrous, confused, and abhorrent . . .” (45). But to the Christian believer, Christ’s refusal to clutch and hold on to his divinity—to live as a person of lowly station and die as a criminal—is the reason every knee should bend at the sound of his name (Phil 2:10–11). After his conversion, Augustine “recognized the ‘lowliness’ of the Biblical style, which . . . [given the incarnation] possessed a new and profound sublimity” (47).78 The sermo humilis style bears affinities to Dostoevsky’s Christian or incarnational realism, both in the narrator’s relationship to characters like Fyodor, and in its deep valuing of ordinary life’s capacity to point, analogically, to the divine.

The novel’s narrator “descends to all men in loving-kindness” (“Sermo” 65) by pointing to the possibility of the two conflicting responses—both histrionic, buffoonish exultation and authentic, childlike grief. He thus humbly acknowledges Fyodor’s possibilities and his own lack of omniscience. He descends from a position above Fyodor, to a position alongside. He slows down and gives Fyodor a more attentive look. The narrator’s negative capability allows him to resist an all-too-neat explanation of Fyodor’s apparently contradictory behavior, and reveals a respect for his ineluctable personhood. “But who knows[?]” the narrator muses earlier in the paragraph, commenting on conflicting explanations of Fyodor’s antics: the narrator—and Dostoevsky behind him—accepts a less-than-omniscient stance in relation to the characters in his story. In the chapter’s final sentence, he reminds us that we ought to go and do likewise. After all, we too can be inconsistent. Thus, in the very first chapter, the narrator-chronicler suggests that the book we are about to read will make a claim upon us: by entering into its characters’ lives, we will recognize some of our own follies. But we may also recover the child-like simple-heartedness that acknowledges our need for others, and that grieves when we lose them to death. “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 18:3).79

The narrator’s “loving descent” from a finalizing position above Fyodor, to an open position beside him is analogous to the kenosis or self-emptying of Christ. In their pioneering biography of Mikhail Bakhtin, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist first suggested this analogy. If Flaubert situates himself in a controlling distance above his characters, Dostoevsky, “in the best kenotic tradition, . . . gives up the privilege of a distinct and higher being to descend into his text, to be among his creatures. Dostoevsky’s distinctive image of Christ results in the central role of polyphony in his fiction” (249). Bakhtin’s concept of “polyphony”—Dostoevsky’s respect for the freedom of his characters, and his willingness to let them speak in their many, diverse voices—is thus integral to the aesthetic form of incarnational realism.80

Here form deeply reflects content: perhaps the key thematic affirmation of The Brothers Karamazov is that each created person is free and thus has a sacred dignity. Dostoevsky’s respect for his character’s freedom is analogous to divine respect for human freedom. Given the human person’s created reality as imago Dei, freedom is intrinsic to human identity. The Grand Inquisitor rejects the “anguish” often occasioned in human freedom, and he insists that Christ’s “gift” has overwhelmed the ordinary person: “Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter” (223). In response, Christ offers no defense. He simply, silently attends, and leaves the Inquisitor with a loving kiss. Christ evinces his respect for the Inquisitor’s personhood, who, after all, has insisted that Christ remain “silent” (217).81 Analogously, the active love exemplified by Zosima and Alyosha respects the freedom of those who seek their counsel. Dostoevsky’s polyphonic authorship respects the freedom and complexity of his characters.

Repetitions or recapitulations of this pattern—Christ’s kenotic descent and ascent—create what Robin Feuer Miller calls “a novel of rhymes”: “[T]he very rhyming or interconnectedness of the parts of The Brothers Karamazov becomes the reader’s own thread through [its] labyrinth of events and ideas. . . . Characters, fragments of plot, fragments of time—all echo and reverberate in unexpected ways and places” (Worlds 13).82 These rhymes lend the novel its formal beauty and recurring sense of mystery. In the next chapter I turn to Dostoevsky’s understanding of beauty, and the way its iconic manifestations call the novel’s characters to moral conversion and confession.