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Fyodor Dostoevsky on Living the Iconic Life

Ralph C. Wood
Baylor University, Waco, Texas 76798-7040


The literary critic Harold Bloom once defined a classic as a book that requires us
permanently to rearrange the furniture of our lives. He meant, I suspect, that such a
text prevents us from viewing the world through conventional lenses; it requires us
not only to see the world with cleansed vision but also to reorder our lives
accordingly. T. S. Eliot defined literary greatness in similar terms. The majority of
poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of
human passions: Dantes [Divine Comedy] is one of those [texts] which one can only
just hope to grow up to at the end of life. Dostoevskys The Brothers Karamazov is
another. I suspect that it has caused more readers of various types and commitments
to redefine themselves both morally and spiritually than has any other book, excepting
only Dantes.

Neither of the books here considered is devoted entirely to an explication of
The Brothers Karamazov; on the contrary, they both attend to the whole of Dostoevskys
fiction. Yet this greatest of Dostoevskys novels becomes the center of their focus; for
it is there, more than in any other place, that Dostoevsky most convincingly confronts
the peril and promise of late-Enlightenment modernity. In Dostoevsky and the
Affirmation of Life (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustines Press, 2009), Predrag
Cicovacki, a professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, focuses on a
single injunction that the novice monk Alyosha Karamazov gives to his brother
Dmitri near the end of the novel. Love life, Alyosha enjoins his troubled sibling,
more than its meaning.

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Like many other readers of Dostoevsky, Professor Cicovacki regards Alyosha
as a reliable spokesman for Dostoevsky himself. It is certainly true that Alyosha is
warning Dmitri against the mistake made by their skeptical other brother named Ivan.
Ivan is the Dostoevskian character who most fully embodies the soul-rending doubts
that have become endemic to modern life. Citing the work of Isaiah Berlin, Cicovacki
shows that Ivan is wracked by the three most devastating Enlightenment
humiliations of Christian tradition: (1) the denial that man is the purpose and
center of creation, (2) the insistence that man is a but a creature of nature like all other
animals, and (3) the discovery that reason is not autonomous and objective but
subject to overt passions and covert illusions that radically distort its judgments (p.
17).

Overly simply stated, Cicovackis argument is that Dostoevsky does not give
typically Western answers to these questions. On the contrary, Dostoevsky is an anti-
rationalist who insists, with Alyosha, that it is not only not necessary but actually
impossible to know the meaning of life as a condition for affirming it. In this rather
existentialist reading of Dostoevsky, the great Russian is seen as providing a helpfully
Eastern vision of life over against a more Western outlook. The Eastern church, in
Cicovackis reading of Dostoevsky, provides the novelist a more intuitive and cyclical
view of things than does the rationalist and linear West. Dostoevskys Russian
Orthodoxy is devoted to a mystical sense of the earth as more our mother than as our
sister; it is committed to the God who is more immanent than transcendent.
Dostoevsky regarded life as too contradictory, Cicovacki argues, to be comprehended
and lived on strictly rational grounds. As Dostoevsky himself confessed, there is
nothing more fantastic than reality itself (p. 11).

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The essential contraries are voiced by the surly narrator of Notes from the
Underground, a man dwelling misanthropically and anonymously in his miserable
mousehole. On the one hand, the repressive order of man-managed nature is
represented by the Crystal Palace, the worlds first huge glass-and-iron structure, the
grandiose center for what amounted to the first worlds fair, the Great Exhibition of
1851 in London. It was a triumph of such scientific skill and expertise that it
portended the ultimate reduction of humanity to animality by means of a similar
mastery and control. The totalizing rationalistic systems of late modernity, whether
political or psychological, have frighteningly fulfilled the Underground Mans fear. On
the other hand, there is the destructive freedom that elevates will over reason, the passions
over self-knowledge. In order to keep free from all soul-deadening conformity, we are
called to indulge our voluptuous desires in arbitrary acts of self-will. The various
irrationalisms of post-modernity again make Dostoevsky exceedingly prescient. One
needs only to inspect Benedict XVIs protest against the de-Hellenization of
Christianity to see how Dostoevsky anticipated the advent of nihilistic subjectivism.
The subject decides, declared the pope in 2006, on the basis of his experiences,
what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective conscience
becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical.

According to the Underground Man, life cannot be both ordered and free, both
just and happy. Hence his final despair. The chief contention of Professor Cicovackis
book is to show that Dostoevsky overcomes this deadly antinomy in the four great
novels of his maturity: The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, The Devils (also translated as The
Possessed), and especially in The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky achieves this triumph
by discerning that the Underground Mans irreconcilable opposites are in fact
dialectical polarities that cannot be divided but must be united. Their union requires a
subrational affirmation of life as the supreme gift. God grants us the drastic freedom
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either to ennoble or degrade this largest of all gifts. Dmitri Karamazov describes such
ennoblement and such degradation when he declares that every human heart is
imbued with the contradictory ideals of the Madonna, on the one hand, and of
Sodom on the otherthe utterly sacred and the utterly profane. Hence Dmitris
famous complaint: Man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down (p.
257).

Though his argument is too subtle complex for brief treatment, Professor
Cicovacki argues that Dostoevsky refuses any such constriction of human life. Its
troublesome breadth and incomprehensible variety are the source of its sustaining and
invigorating vitality. Ivan Karamazov ends in cruelty and madness because he will not
embrace such a harsh and contradictory world. He demands to understand why the
universe is full of purposeless suffering before he will embrace it. Dmitri, by contrast,
finds newness of life because he gradually discerns, with Alyoshas help, that God
creates a partially indeterminate cosmos in order to leave room for human freedom.
Authentic faith is the willingness to affirm the complementarity of good and evil
indeed, to embrace the God who lacks any discernible essence and who is the God
of existence, the God of the mysterious flow of life (p. 332):
Dmitri does not search for the meaning of life but the experience of being
alive. He does not ask what the meaning of life is but senses that it is he who is
being asked. Dmitri understands that he is being questioned by life and that he
must answer with his own life. His answer consists in reverence and awe for
lifehe serves this life without any demands for rights, or pretensions of
greatness. Dmitri is the incarnation of the affirmation of life, even in the face
of evil. If there is a hero in The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri is it. (p. 311)

In his Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Waco, Texas: Baylor University
Press, 2008), Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, also regards Dmitri as
the hero of the novel, but for radically opposed reasons. Dostoevsky, in his view, does
not respond to the challenges of the Enlightenment with an existentialist appeal to
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love life apart from its meaning. The Anglican bishop-theologian confesses that his
task is not easy. Dostoevsky himself notoriously claimed that, if he were pressed to
choose between Christ and the truth, he would not hesitate to choose Christ. Yet
Williams demonstrates that, by truth, Dostoevsky does not refer to the veracity or
trustworthiness of being itself, but rather to the modern conception of a closed
universe where every effect is inevitably produced by its antecedent cause, where
human nature and desire become mechanisms that can be controlled by the powerful,
and thus where arbitrary will is all that finally matters. Dostoevsky was right, Williams
argues, to reject such a pernicious notion of truth.

Williamss basic thesis is that, for Dostoevsky, love is always a difficult and
often deceptive thing, never something obvious and uncomplicated. On the contrary,
its the demonic that would make life horribly easy. Ivan Karamazovs famous claim
that, if God is dead, then all things are permitted is much more satanic than the
traditional reading indicates. He is not simply stating the rather obvious notion that, if
there were no afterlife to guarantee justice for the good and punishment for the evil,
then everyone would eagerly serve their own wills, all restraint being lifted, all crime
becoming legitimate. What he really and terribly means is this: If God is dead, then
the ego must occupy his vacant place. In the absence of God, there is no transcendent
order for determining the difference between atrocity and beauty, between love and
hatred of neighbor, between virtue or and viceexcept as the solitary self decides.
No wonder that Nietzsche, the apostle of autonomous will, declared God to be dead
at virtually the same time Ivan was making his own pronouncement.

It follows that Dostoevskys Devil is not, like Goethes Mephistopheles, a
friendly spirit who negates, a naughty imp of the perverse who keeps the life
from becoming an endless Sunday school picnic of tedious yea-saying. He is, instead,
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the deceptive specter who leaves us in suspense concerning his own reality or
unreality: We do not know, Williams declares, what it is that emerges from our
own intelligence [as hallucination] and what is given to us and required of us from
beyond ourselvesboth the vision of God and the vision of total meaninglessness.
Yet there is hope for Satans final defeat and thus our own undeception. The arch
dissembler cannot dwell forever, Williams writes, because he is locked out from the
self-commitment of bodily and temporal life and thus from the self-risking of love
(p. 43). Though Ivan Karamazov ends in demonic insanity, he at least retains the
miserable integrity of his unbelief. Dostoevsky might have enabled him (if he had
lived to write his sequel to The Brothers Karamazov) to become a holy fool in the
Orthodox traditiona man who, like St. Basil of Moscow, so totally abandoned
himself to God that he didnt bother to wear clothes.

Such a serious estimate of the Devil reveals that Dostoevsky may be our
profoundest Christian artist. In his fiction, the path toward goodness and salvation is
not easily traversed. Its not a matter of discerning the inherent order of the universe
and then ordering our lives according to it, in rigorous medieval fashion. Our age
faces new possibilities for both good and evil. Dostoevsky is the most convincing
modern writer because engages these new chances and changes, acknowledging rather
than avoiding the worlds troubling ambiguity and inherent disorder. He refuses to
make God into a tyrant who constantly slaps the world into shape. He is the God of
love, not in spite of his refusal to overrule human freedom but rather because He works
through personal agency. Faith moves and adapts, matures and reshapes itself, by
the relentless stripping away of egoistic or triumphalistic expectations (p. 10). If
God were to make faith a matter of assured and relentless progress, then He would
not be the self-emptying God but the sovereign Manager of the universe, a divine
monster akin to the Devil himself.
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Secular interpreters have often made the opposite casethat Dostoevsky seeks
to be a Christian novelist but in fact fails, as his work finally succumbs to the worlds
endless ambiguity and uncertainty. As Blake famously said of Milton, so do they say of
Dostoevsky: he was of the Devils party without knowing it. Such skeptics insist
that the conflicting narrators and contradictory characters and opposing scenes reveal
that Dostoevsky did not succeed in giving fictional embodiment to his Christian
convictions. Rowan Williams turns these critics on their head. Dostoevsky is all the
more persuasively Christian, he argues, for refusing any obvious strategy of closure
in the narrative (p. 8). Dostoevskys inconclusiveness places the real burden on the
reader to decide whether Christian faith can offer a lasting reconciliation of lifes
seemingly insuperable antagonisms. Never does Dostoevsky make the Gospel into a
proposition that offers ready dictates or easy resolutions. It is truly Good News in its
very oddity, its peculiar refusal to take its place as one among many means to a noble
life, as yet another instrument for achieving virtue and avoiding vice. Its truth is
singular, paradoxical, strange, unfinished.

Williamss most revolutionary discovery is that Dostoevskys fiction is open-
ended and unfinished because it is Christian. His novels are inconclusive (though not
relativistic) in ways that reflect Gods own inconclusive action in the world:
The Dostoevskian novel . enacts the freedom it discusses by creating a
narrative space in which various futures are possible for characters and for
readers. And in so doing it seeks to represent the ways in which the worlds
creator exercises authorship, generat[ing] dependence without control. (p. 12)

Hence the subtitle of Williamss book and one of its central insights: Faith and fiction
are profoundly linked. They are both practices that stand over against a world of
ordinary giving and getting, of hurting and being hurt. Faith is a free response to
Gods own freedom as we unexpectedly and undeservedly encounter it within the
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knotty resistances of the world. Dostoevskian fiction is similarly gratuitous. It
narratively reveals that no human situation can be finally hopeless and finished. Death
is rarely the conclusion of most Dostoevsky novels. His belief in immortality makes
him concerned not primarily with what happens in the afterlife but rather with the
unprecedented worth of every human being, no matter how seemingly valueless.

This means that the Lord of freedom values his creation so profoundly that he
permits his creatures freely to refuse both acceptance and understanding of his world.
Ivan Karamazov is the most notable example, as we have seen. Ivan assails God, in
agonizing protest, for allowing innocent children to suffer unspeakable evils. Nowhere
does Dostoevsky provide a vision of cosmic harmony as an answer to this most
unanswerable of questions. Yet neither does he despair of all resolution. His fiction
contains no irrationalist resignation to the final untruthfulness of things. Nor does he
make Christ into a stark sign of absolute contradiction to the world, an unworldly
savior who transports his disciples into blissful acceptance and undoubting faith.

Instead, Dostoevsky has his characters learn how to dwell amidst wrenching
tensions and contradictions. Among the many paradoxes at work in Dostoevskys
fiction, Ivans protest is perhaps the most obvious. Without an ultimate order of
significance, his outcry would have no meaning, his care for children no substance, his
love for the sticky little leaves in spring no validity. Yet this transcendent order is
immensely complex and often uncomforting. Dostoevskys Christ does not merely
confirm and re-establish the worlds best impulses. He introduces radically new
possibilities and realities. He interrupts closed systems of thinking and destructive ways
of desiring. He refuses to leave us alone in our joylessness and lovelessness. Yet He
never coerces. For then He would become just another force of nature, and the
church would be just another product of culture:
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Christ is apprehended when something not planned or foreseen in the contents
of the world breaks through, in an act or event that represents the gratuity of
love or joy. And such an event alters what is possible by offering the will what
might be called a truthful or appropriate direction for desire. It does not
compel and cannot be treated in the framework of causes and effects; if the
possibility is not caught, nothing can make it. (p. 30)

To catch the Gospel is the greatest of all gifts, and to hold on to it is the
greatest of all privileges. But such a life entails no promise of happiness or security.
There is no guarantee that the world will be healed or that we ourselves shall be
spared immense suffering. On the contrary, to be immersed in the viscous reality of
the world by making choices and reaping their consequences is inevitably to be
burdened by both hurt and guilt. This explains why Williams finds Prince Myshkin,
the protagonist of The Idiot, to be disturbingly un-Christlike. Myshkin causes
inadvertent harm, in fact, because he remains so innocent, so cut off from a
suffering solidarity with other human beings, so free of guilty responsibility for
them.

Neither is Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov a figure of unalloyed goodness.
Hence Father Zosimas insistence that he leave the monastery and enter the world.
Without learning to give and to receive both blessing and injury, he would become a
dangerous monk indeed. Even the holiest of Dostoevskys characters, Zosima
himself, makes his ringing affirmations about love and joy and the goodness of the
world only after he has confronted the cost of Christlikeness:
For Jesus to be human at all is for him to be faced with choices not simply
between good and evil but between options that might arguably be good but
also bring with them incalculable costs. The options that confront actual
historical agents are not like self-contained items on a shelf or rack awaiting
buyers; they are part of a continuum of human policies that may be flawed and
damaging, and they will already be constrained by what has happened [in the
past]. This is the concrete meaning of embracing the consequences of
fallenness. (p. 57)
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Perhaps the most remarkable of the archbishops claims is that Dostoevskys
fiction is most faithfully Orthodox (in the Eastern sense) because it is
uncompromisingly apophatic. This technical term refers to the inability of all human
categories to conceptualize God. Rather than assigning human attributes to God that
threaten to make him an infinitely large version of ourselves, we do better to say what
God is notimmortal, invisible, God only wise, as the old hymn declares, in light
inaccessible hid from our eyes. Dostoevskys fiction finely embodies this negative
theology by holding to the principle that whatever is specifically said of God has
also to be un-said as soon as it seems to offer the seductive prospect of a definition of
the divine essence (p. 59).
There is, for Dostoevsky, no form of words about faith that is beyond
criticism; sincerity is not enough. To refuse to [admit the relativity of ones
faith] would be to suggest that a point had been reached where there was
nothing more to be saidwhich would be to take refuge in the escape from
time which undermines true faith. There is nothing sayable that cannot be
answered or contradicted or qualified in some way or another. [E]very new
statement of faith has to issue into a linguistic world where it may be either
contradicted, ignored, parodied or trivialized as a clich. (p. 45)

In a brilliant final chapter on icons and iconic characters, the Archbishop of
Canterbury argues that icons reveal the mystery they portray. They are a presence more
than an action. They disclose what is hidden in the person who is confronted by
[them]. The more depth and fullness in the depiction, the more the capacity to unveil
the beholder (p. 206). It is not surprising that Williams should regard Father Zosima
as an iconic figure in this precise sense: everyone in The Brothers Karamazov finds
fulfillment or frustration in relation to him. Henot an abstract theodicy that
requires Christians to justify and accept the undeserved suffering of childrenis the
answer to Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor.

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Dmitri, the brother who is blamed for the murder of his father, though in fact
he is technically innocent, is the iconic hero of the novel. He comes, ever so gradually
and reluctantly, to practice the celebrated teaching of Father Zosima that all are
responsible for all. Dmitri takes responsibility for having wished and longed for his
fathers death. He accepts his undeserved imprisonment in the conviction that he
cannot receive Gods mercy except through what Williams calls an appalled longing
for expiation (p. 219). Dmitri reveals, above all, that Dostoevsky does not compel a
choice between Christ and the truth. Christ is the Truth because he is the primordial
Icon, the eternal image of God (p. 207).

Yet he is no obvious or manageable image. In accord with the Christian East,
Dostoevsky discerns a deeply kenotic, self-emptying quality in the incarnate Christ.
He both reveals and withholds himself. His loving presence is known through his
voluntary absence. He creates both understanding and not-understanding, reverence
and contempt. Its not that these opposites are equal and self-cancelling, but that
Christ enables and requires his disciples to live within their tension, as he himself
supremely lived. Even the eternal, finally authoritative image, when it is manifested
in history, is subject to rejection and disfiguring; the Word of God is not naturally and
visibly the last word in history (p. 207).

Evil, by contrast, seeks the absolute finality that faith foregoes. It wants to be
uncontradicted and unqualified. It does so, Williams argues, by refusing to occupy
space and time, to inhabit bodies and histories and limits. Satan is the discarnate
emperor of Nothing, a figure for whom all moments and choices and persons are
equally null and thus equally interchangeable. No wonder that Dostoevskys nihilistic
characters often end in suicide, the choice to end all choices. By contrast, the figure in
the face of an icon engenders new life. It comes forth to meet the viewer with an
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otherness that is ultimately quite inaccessible to me and resistant to my control,
Williams observes. [I]t is an otherness that seeks itself in me, and enables me to seek
myself in it, not a diminution of my own solidity but the condition for it (p. 208).
Icons invite us to live with transformed if also troubled faces. Iconic figures who have
not yet been transformed are always shown in profile, for not to have a full face is not
to be fully human. When souls start to break down, declared Dostoevskys
contemporary Nicholai Gogol, then faces also degenerate.

Our is a faceless and demonic Age of Ashes because so many of our political
and economic regimes have had an anti-iconic estimate human beings, regarding them
not as images of God but as undifferentiated and dispensable units to be used for
placeless and timeless projects of manipulation and control. In cultures such as ours,
where there are few convincing declarations of the Gospel and still fewer human
icons of Christ in the world, the command to Love God hardly registers. It has little
if any greater force than Eat Wheaties, as Thomas Merton sardonically observed.
Thus does Williamss description of life in Dostoevskys novel called The Devils also
describe our own late time:
There are no narrative icons around, and so the cultic icon [employed in
worship] is in danger of being seen as equally an empty sign, without power.
And when the image, in painted wood or flesh and blood, is experienced as
vacuous and ineffectual, the potential for realizing the image of God in actual
human beings disappears: no icon, no human compassion or self-questioning.
(p. 218)
***
Predrag Cicovacki has written a provocative and partially convincing book on
Dostoevsky. Rowan Williams work belongs to an entirely different category: it is the
profoundest theological and literary treatise I have read for many years. I commend it
especially to those who may be disagreed with the archbishops stance on certain
moral issues. None of such current controversies arise in this remarkable book, and in
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no way does his position there invalidate his argument here. It would be a terrible
error to dismiss Rowan Williams as just another liberal. Instead, he is a theologian
who is eager to break bread with the dead, as W. H. Auden called our communion
with the past. Williams is one of the most eminent theologians of our time for the
same reason that Dostoevsky remains one of the most eminent writers of our age.
They both enable us to confront the fiercest challenges to Christianity. Dostoevsky
accomplishes this stunning feat by remaining at once profoundly Eastern and Western,
both traditional and contemporary. He shares the anguish of Western self-
consciousness, even he engages it with an Eastern iconic imagination. He beckons us
not to denigrate but rather to integrate authentic doubt with true holiness of life.