The Gospel in Dostoyevsky. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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tradition it represented but in the apparently new and exciting philosophies of the Enlightenment. The theories of rationalism, romanticism, positivism, agnosticism, humanism, nihilism, anarchism, and communism were standard fare at the dinner tables of the aristocratic intellectuals. It is sometimes affirmed that the tragedy of Russia is that it never enjoyed the civilizing influence of the Renaissance. I do not think this is true. From the time of Peter the Great on, the intellectual climate of Russia was influenced by the ideas spawned in the post-Renaissance period of the West. Those of the nineteenth century expressed the rejection of Christianity and its moral principles, which had contributed to the development of Western democracy. Such was the intellectual atmosphere that involved Dostoyevsky in the struggle of faith.
His writings reveal that he remembered a great deal of his early Christian education. The book of Job made a lasting impression upon him. It is the story of the righteous man who suffered and through his suffering came to participate in a personal dialogue with the living God. What had once been hearsay was transcended into fact by meeting God face to face. In seeing God, Job repented in humiliation through which his former life of superficial righteousness was discarded for the righteousness of the right relationship granted to him by the action of God. Reference to this spiritual experience is made by Staretz Zossima in his account of his fascination with Job at the age of eight.
Along with Dostoyevsky’s instruction in the gospel went instruction in the stories of the saints. The one that made a deep impression on him was the account of a fourteenth-century Russian saint by the name of Sergey. This saint lived as a hermit in the forest, sustaining himself daily by a piece of bread. One day he encountered a large bear at the entrance of his hut. Instead of running away, the saint befriended the bear and shared his meager rations with him. Thereafter, the bear visited him daily. Dostoyevsky refers to this story in The Brothers Karamazov. Its influence is obvious in Staretz Zossima’s great poem of love: “Love all God’s creation…Love the animals, love the plants, love everything.”
Another influence was that of the monks in their monasteries (page 219). Dostoyevsky regarded them as expressing the purest form of spiritual life. They turned away from the lusts of the flesh and worldly power to be with God, to identify with the poor and the outcasts just as Jesus had done, and to serve them in love. Thus the portrait Dostoyevsky gives us of his ideal Christian is that of Zossima, who like himself had once been a slave of pride. In his pride and anger and for no reason, he had mercilessly beaten his batman (servant) in the army. By repentance he participated in the new life of the Spirit and in utter humility sought the forgiveness of the peasant he had wronged.
The publication of his Poor Folk in 1846 may mark the time of his change from being a conventional Christian to becoming a radical socialist and atheist. Belinsky befriended him and hailed his book as a work of great literary art. The radical intellectuals of this period regarded Belinsky as their hero. In following his leadership Dostoyevsky took the way that led to his arrest and the death sentence in 1849. At the moment of execution he was reprieved. We may imagine what a traumatic experience that was. It marks the change from the intellectual dilettante playing with ideas like a Greek hero-god to his involvement with sinners as a sinner. He gives us a description of this terrifying moment in The Idiot when he describes the scene of the mass of people come to watch the execution and the loneliness of the victim. As spectators they watch the priest holding the cross for the victim to kiss “with his blue lips” (page 135).
After this reprieve Dostoyevsky served four years of hard labor and then five years of exile in Siberia. Those were years of utter humiliation. His very moving The House of the Dead, which was written from his diary, tells the story of his suffering and his depression. It was “a time of living burial.” It was also the time of his crucifixion and resurrection. On his way to prison a woman thrust a New Testament into his hand. This provided him with the means of entering into and dwelling in the passion and exaltation of Jesus. Suffering had become a way of the cross for him even after his return from Siberian exile. His lot was one of sickness, poverty, debts, and overwork. The fruits of his suffering, however, are his literary achievements. Because of his debts he was forced to become an exile, yet once again. In this exile he wrote The Idiot and The Possessed.
As well as being a description of his degradation, The House of the Dead is a metaphor of human existence similar to the one used earlier by Pascal: namely, we are all cast into the death cell, and we experience daily our own death in the death of the other. This may be regarded as the basis of Christian existentialism. Descartes’ famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), presumes that reason precedes existence. This is the fallacious premise which closed the Fabian intellect of Ivan Karamazov to the primacy of existence. But sin is not a failure of conditioning or an unwholesome idea. It is the major fact of the human condition. It was this fact that turned Dostoyevsky from Belinsky and his nihilistic revolutionary theories, to Christ and his gospel. The Possessed (or The Devils) is an illustration of the descent from utopian socialism to the blind, black pit of demonic rebellion. It is also a prophecy of Russia’s future, in which it would surrender to the temptations of “wonder” bread and power and give its soul to the Grand Inquisitor.
The awful nature of evil as our rebellion against God, which Dostoyevsky portrayed so vividly, has troubled many of his critics. He has been judged as a pathologically disturbed person unduly fascinated by the despair of depression. Such a criticism is in essence a reflection of the Euclidean mind. The romantic vision of a utopia governed by the ideologically enlightened “philosopher kings” is one that ignores our present existence. Such utopias are seldom more than the projections of the present place and time idealized in order to conform to our judgments. In other words, they are constructed from what is at hand, including the injustices we wish to correct. One example of this is Freud’s analysis of Dostoyevsky in which he accused him of denigrating acceptable morality by plunging his characters into the pit of evil and then exalting them, as in the case of Raskolnikov, to the heights of moral excellency. Another example is that of a critic who described Dostoyevsky as “The Rasputin of literature.” In the manner of Ivan, such critics can allow no place for the acceptance of the mystery of grace.
Admittedly his works could be described as psychopathological but only by those who are ignorant of the gospel he came to love so well. The good news is that God in Christ has entered into our condition to the extent of dying for us on the cross. He is with us, that is, at the moment of our ultimate failure, to transform it into the beauty of eternal life. By faith, we enjoy the wonder of Christ’s presence. As at the wedding feast at Cana, his presence is an occasion of great joy.
The present revival of religion in the Soviet Union owes much to Dostoyevsky and his early admirers. He has made an enormous contribution to the Christian thinkers who have been, and are, leaders in this spiritual reformation. Perhaps the best and most revealing testimony to his witness is that made by Nicholas A. Berdyaev in his admirable book Dostoyevsky. He writes, “He stirred and lifted up my soul more than any other writer or philosopher has done, and for me people are always divided into ‘dostoyevskyites’ and those to whom his spirit is foreign… ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,’ in particular, made such an impression on my young mind that when I turned to Jesus Christ for the first time, I saw him under the appearance that he bears in the Legend.”
Ernest Gordon
Author of Miracle on the River Kwai
FAITH IN GOD
The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor
This “prose poem” from The Brothers Karamazov is probably the climax of Dostoyevsky’s religious confessions. It is put into the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, who refuses to recognize God although he admits God’s existence.
“HE CAME SOFTLY, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognized him. The people are irresistibly drawn to him, they surround him, they flock about him, follow him. He moves silently in their midst with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The sun of love burns in his heart; light and power shine from his eyes; and their radiance, shed on the people,