FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Xmas with Dostoevsky

Rant Number 377 23 December 2009

Love, hope, beauty, innocence, faith, angels, saints, martyrs, icons, salvation, forgiveness, redemption, incarnation, self-denial, plenitude, Heaven – but also the Devil, fiends, terrorism, murder, suicide, rape, torture, child abuse, misery, madness, paedophilia, lying, blasphemies, sacrilege, despair, atheism...Dostoevsky’s dramatis personae exhibit all that, and more. They are the heroes and villains of novels like The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, The Demons, Notes from Underground and Memories from the House of the Dead. A lifelong fan of the Russian genius, I am awed by his creation. Now Rowan Williams’ book, Dostoevsky, regales the reader with fresh angles and epiphanies into a Christian writer’s almost infinite, intriguing universe. Should you protest that Dostoevsky is not a suitable subject at this time of Good News, recall that no sooner did the Holy Child come into the world that King Herod sought to murder him, by massacring all the innocent babes of Bethlehem. Thus Christmas, like Dostoevsky’s world, includes both light and darkness. Plenty of both.

One valuable insight is into the figure of Prince Myshkin, the eponymous Idiot. The word here means not someone of very low intelligence, an imbecile, but a guileless, pure, innocent, even beautiful being. A standard line is to term Myshkin ‘Christ-like’. His very looks, the Archbishop points out, mirror ‘the traditional Orthodox iconography of the Saviour’. Yet, Rowan continues, this meek and virtuous person’s influence is ‘unwittingly a force of destruction’. Why? Because Myshkin is an unfallen Adam in the midst of fallen humanity. His ‘timeless virtue has no resources of memory and critical self-awareness to make it effective in the world of human relations.’ To illustrate: imagine someone without rivalry and pride, a person utterly lacking in amour propre and self-defence, bereft of desire for money or sex, suddenly plunged in the midst of Goldman Sachs, or HSBC, or Greenpeace, or even the average church congregation – like putting a lamb among hungry lions. Alternatively, this goodness incarnate might rock the boat and cause a lot of mischief. Be a ‘diabolical’ presence. To reverse Goethe’s definition of the Devil, this unfallen man might will forever good but do forever evil.

The priest does know someone like Myshkin. His name is Shahin. A Holy Fool. An absolutely loveable person. A Muslim Christ figure. Utterly selfless. Groan... so Shahin’s innocence has made him easy prey of crooks, anti-Semites and Nazis. Searchlight exposed him once. Dark stories about Shahin abound. I fear for his fate – will it be madness and darkness, like Myshkin’s?

Dostoevsky’s idea of being Christ-like is actually too sentimental, naive and un-historical. A passive and silent figure, his Christ bears little relation to the Messiah you meet in the Gospels. Would such an anaemic, effete person make disciples, cast out demons and drive out the moneychangers from the Temple with a whip? Moreover, Christian symbolism conceives Christ as both a lamb and a lion. (Revelation 5:5-6). Which is not to deny the idea has a certain appeal – the appeal of an ideal. I do sometimes wish I was like Prince Myshkin...

The challenge of atheism looms large in Dostoevsky. ‘If there is no God then everything is permitted’, one of his troubled characters contends. But the answer is not a vain search for logical proofs of God’s existence – something irrelevant to the speaker’s yearning for meaning and shape in his life. Williams shows this well. The point is rather that if God does not exist then there is no power superior to the human will. ‘If God vacates his place, the human ego will move in.’ Another insight. But, if God exists, what would that entail? A question that applies to believers, also. It invites serious self-examination. ‘If I live like this, how can I claim to believe in God?’ you might wonder. The being of God is thus more of a challenge to believers than to unbelievers.

‘I don’t think you are a Christian’, cocky young J. blurted out to me the other day. It startled me. And made me think. Could it be that I, a priest, do not really believe in God? Is that possible? Huh! Devilish doubt indeed.

Talking of the Devil. The Archbishop calls him ‘the enemy of narrative’. Of men’s freedom to shape their identities over time. This is in a way conventional and correct theodicy. God’s supreme gift to man is freedom and the devil – quite an important figure in Dostoevsky - is out to interfere with that. A great author, like God, does not create mere puppets or cardboard cut-outs. His fictional characters are allowed enough freedom, independence and authenticity to make the story interesting, unpredictable and profound. As such, none of them is a simple spokesman for the writer. The novels of Dostoevsky are polyphonic and dialogic. So those fascinating, endlessly talking Russians in a sense show how God wants you and I to be – free, open, growing, challenging and being challenged by others in ongoing dialogues and relationships.

Do you buy it? Some would find the analogy between being God’s creature and a character in a novel not so brilliant. ‘I feel as if I had been written’, says someone pessimistically in a John Fowles story. And a critic as sharp as J.L. Borges writes of the murderer Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment that his crime was not free ‘because an inevitable network of circumstances predetermined it and dictated it’. Hence for Borges the student Raskolnikov’s crime was necessitated, rather than freely chosen. ‘Why have you written me thus? A murderer!’ I guess the young man could angrily question his creator. Furthermore, I never found Raskolnikov’s final confession and subsequent metanoia in Siberia quite convincing. It seems to be that Dostoevski has perhaps allowed himself a bit of Deus ex machina role there, against Williams’ authorial ideal.

I have got this suspicion, no doubt unfounded, that Rowan Williams thinks of Heaven as a place where the Blessed go on arguing. Arguing about women priests, gay bishops, same sex marriages, animal rights and the like. A bit like people do in the Anglican Church over which he presides. And of course the point is that he thinks that is all right. No final conclusions are possible for him. No certainties. No absolute principles. No clear truths as to how to guide Christian conduct. Dialogues, conversations, narratives, polyphonies, that’s what is essential.

Still, I won’t be cantankerous. It is Christmas. Archbishop, you have made me think about Dostoevsky in a new, fresh way. Thanks a lot!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli