The Gospel in Dostoyevsky. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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look at the painting that had made such an impression on him.
Anna’s own reaction was one of revulsion. She writes of the painting that, contrary to tradition, Christ is depicted “with an emaciated body, the bones and ribs showing, the hands and feet pierced by wounds, swollen and very blue, as in a corpse that is beginning to rot. The face is agonized, and the eyes are half open, but unseeing and expressionless. The nose, mouth, and chin have turned blue.”
The reason that Anna was so horrified was that Holbein’s picture shows the body of Christ in a state of decomposition. On the other hand, as far as Dostoyevsky was concerned, the picture’s fascination was precisely that it did show Christ’s body decomposing. If his body was not subject to decay like other bodies, then the sacrifice on the cross was quite meaningless; Christ had to be a man like other men in order to die for men. In other words, at the incarnation, God did truly become a man.
Dostoyevsky was a truly prophetic figure, plunging down frenziedly into his kingdom of hell on earth and arriving at Golgotha. He had a tremendous insight into the future and foresaw the world we have today. He also proclaimed the coming of a universal brotherhood brought about, not by socialism and revolution, but by the full and perfect realization of Christian enlightenment.
In the serener circumstances of his last years, Dostoyevsky’s essential love of life and joy in all God’s creation found a surer expression than ever before. “Beauty,” he makes Dmitri Karamazov say, “is not only a terrible thing, it is also a mysterious thing. There God and the devil strive for mastery, and the battleground is the heart of men.”
I continue to marvel at the chance – if chance it was – whereby the works of one of the greatest Christian writers of modern times should have continued to circulate in the world’s first avowedly atheistic state – Dostoyevsky’s devastatingly penetrating exposition of sin and suffering and redemption. Supposing one were asked to name a book calculated to give an unbeliever today a clear notion of what Christianity is about, could one hope to do much better than The Brothers Karamazov?
Malcolm Muggeridge
Introduction
THIS BOOK OF EXCERPTS from the writing of Dostoyevsky begins, very rightly, with “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” from The Brothers Karamazov. This is the high point of the stories he incorporates into his novels and essays. They are similar to the parables told by Jesus. They provide the reader with a practical illustration of a universal truth that can be described in no other way. “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” is a superb parable of human existence. It raises the great, or cursed, questions so characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s passion for the living gospel. Only in the light of the gospel is the complexity of human existence made understandable, purposeful, and hopeful. Without it there is no meaning to the daily round of human life.
One might expect the Legend to be narrated by a believer. It is not. It is a prose poem composed by Ivan, the Karamazov brother who is the rationalist and the man of “the Euclidean mind.” He, like the believer, is passionately involved in the gospel but in terms of its rejection, because it does not conform to his logic or his demand for “justice.” He cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is. The only logical thing left for him to do is to return his ticket to existence. But to whom is he to return it? “And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man, I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.” Thus the idea of God is essential even for someone who is trying passionately to deny him.
Alyosha, the believing brother, understands this tormented position and classifies it as rebellion, the rebellion of the disbeliever, who must have “justice.” If he cannot have it, then he has no recourse but to destroy himself. In analyzing his brother’s position Alyosha is describing man after the fall, man in rebellion against God, man seeking to be as God. Thus sin is not passive but active; not simply a failure to obey God’s command, but a deliberate refusal to obey; indeed, an act of defiance.
Ivan, in telling “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” is thus telling his own story. He rebels against God’s ordering of creation and denies the effectiveness of Christ’s redemption. His Euclidean mind rejects the reality of God, man, and nature because it does not measure up to his formula of justice. Although he agonizes over the suffering of innocent children, he does so nevertheless, not from his love of them, but rather from his idea of its injustice. He confesses, “I never could understand how one can love one’s neighbors. It’s just one’s neighbors, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love people at a distance.” “One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract” (page 24). Such is the position of the Grand Inquisitor. For love of humanity he has assumed the burden of its freedom, a freedom too great for the people to bear. In assuming this burden he has chosen the way of the three temptations, which Jesus rejected for the sake of freedom. Thus he tells Jesus, “At last we have completed that work in thy name…Today people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet” (page 6).
The freedom to which the Grand Inquisitor refers is the freedom of illusion. At best it is an idea and no more than that. Thus he believes himself to be justified in giving the masses bread in exchange for their soul. The mystery of his ideology replaces the divine mystery. By means of it the people assume that the bondage enforced by “the sword of Caesar” is indeed the freedom they seek.
The tragic irony of Ivan’s situation is thus reflected in the image of the Grand Inquisitor. Both of them understand the mystery of the gospel as the mystery of divine/human freedom, yet they cannot accept it. They are in bondage. In rejecting the deliverance offered to them in the God-man they have chosen to be the man-God; the man who rules the Tower of Babel, or any tyranny in any time and in any place. It is on this note that the Legend ends. Jesus, whom the Grand Inquisitor has condemned, kisses “his bloodless, aged lips.” “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea” (page 19). For the sake of his idea he condemns Jesus who is the Word become flesh. The passion of his Euclidean thinking leaves him with no alternative.
Dostoyevsky raises the question about the gospel: What is it? The answer is that it is the good news of our deliverance. St. Paul’s great affirmation in Galatians 5:1 is the triumphant note of freedom achieved for us in and by Christ, “For freedom Christ set us free.” This is not just an idea invented by scholars. It is the costly action of God in his freedom. This freedom has awful consequences. We have the freedom to defy the living God who has created us. What we term the Fall is an act of freedom. It is a negative freedom, however; it is that of rebellion. This is our condition without God – rebels who are driven by pride to assume what they imagine to be the power of God over others. We claim the freedom to sin, but we are unwilling to assume its consequences. We turn to Satan for justification, as the Grand Inquisitor (or Ivan) did. He is their invention as the justifier of their rebellion. These are the Grand Inquisitor’s words: “The wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and nonexistence, the great spirit talked with thee [Jesus] in the wilderness.” For both him and Ivan the miracle is not our Lord’s rejection of the three temptations, but their own invention and preservation of them. They are “the whole future history of the world and of humanity” (page 7). They represent the choice of human pride, the original sin.
Although humankind has chosen to rebel against God, God has not rebelled against it and all its members. His love will not let them go. Makar presents this truth, “I’d be frightened to meet a truly godless man…I’ve never really met a man like that. What I have met were restless men, for that’s what they should really be called…They come from all classes, even the lowest…but it’s all restlessness” (page 209). This restlessness describes the situation of all who were called to be pilgrims on the way to the