F. M. Dostoevsky and Christianity

To the 175th anniversary of his birth

     On November 11, 1996, an evening dedicated to the 175th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was held at the Moscow Patriarchate Publishing House as part of the "Publishing Wednesdays." The evening was organized by the Department of Church Charity and Social Service of the Moscow Patriarchate, headed by Archbishop Sergiy of Solnechnogorsk. A report on the work of the Christian writer was made by Professor of the Moscow Theological Academy A. I. Osipov. We bring this report to the attention of our readers.

     The best people are known by the highest moral development and the highest moral influence. F. M. Dostoevsky

     Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky belongs to that relatively small part of humanity which is called living people, people who carry within themselves the fire that never ceases to warm their souls in the search for the Truth and following it. Perhaps the best background for the depiction of these people is another part of humanity, about which the Lord Jesus Christ said to His disciple: "Let the dead bury their dead" (Matt. 8:22). These others are people who are indifferent in their worldview. They do not think about the soul, about moral responsibility before conscience and God, about truth, about any other meaning of life than this worldly, exclusively earthly, transitory. These are the "lukewarm" ones, of whom the Scripture says: "I will spew thee out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:15).      How far from them is Dostoevsky in the type of his personality! For all the complexity of his character and moral manifestations of his difficult nature, he was a man burning with search, searching for the sacred, the highest Truth – not a philosophical abstract truth, for the most part not obliging a person to anything, but an eternal Truth, which should be embodied in life and preserve a person from spiritual death. However, it is only from the point of view of eternity that it is possible, according to Dostoevsky, to speak of Truth, for it is God Himself, and therefore the renunciation of the idea of God will inevitably lead mankind to destruction. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky puts the following significant words into the mouth of the demon: "In my opinion, there is no need to destroy anything, but only to destroy the idea of God in humanity, that is where we must set to work! With this, with this, we must begin – O blind people who understand nothing! If mankind renounces God without exception, then of its own accord, without anthropophagy, all the old worldview and, above all, all the old morality will fall, and everything new will come. People will copulate in order to take from life all that it can give, but certainly for happiness and joy in this world alone. Man will be exalted by the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and a man-god will appear... And to him "everything is allowed"... There is no law for God! Where God becomes, there is already God's place! Where I stand, there will be the first place at once... Fyodor Mikhailovich expresses and develops the idea of the great significance for man of faith in God and the immortality of the soul in many of his writings and speeches, and it undoubtedly contains the main core of his life and work, the source of his lifelong search for God, which passed in great intellectual and moral struggles, which led him to Christ and the Orthodox Church.      F. M. Dostoevsky as a personality, speaking of him in his own words about man, "is broad... too wide, I would narrow it down." But it is impossible to "narrow" it, otherwise it will no longer be Dostoevsky. Therefore, in order to sin against him as little as possible, let us not touch upon the "breadth" of his personality, give an assessment of his brilliant works, leave the details of his life and work, evade the analysis of the artistic merits and demerits of his works, let us keep silent even about the colossal influence that his creative heritage had and still has on all thinking humanity. Now we will try, as far as possible, to highlight only one question, which lies not at all in the horizontal dimension of the writer's personality and his work, but in the depth of the soul from which flowed an unusually rich stream of values left by the Russian genius to his descendants. So, what is the fundamental idea, or rather, the spirit of Dostoevsky's work, and how could it be characterized not from the point of view of earthly human merits, but sub specie aeternitatis?      Edgar Allan Poe once wrote: "If any ambitious man dreams of revolutionizing by one effort the whole world of human thought, human opinion, and human feeling, the right opportunity is in his hands—the road to immortality lies right before him, it is open and unobstructed. All he has to do is write... a small book. Its title should be simple – three clear words: "My naked heart." But this little book must be true to its title."      If we turn to the history of human thought, it turns out that Edgar Allan Poe was late with his proposal by at least two thousand years. Such a book has already been written, and it has fully exposed the depths of the human heart. True, this small book is called somewhat differently – the Gospel. It opened the way to the world to the perfect knowledge of the human soul: both its inexpressible beauty, the equal of which, according to the expression of Macarius of Egypt, is neither in heaven nor on earth, and that immeasurable evil that arose in the same heart by virtue of man's apostasy from the Truth and Life Itself – God. It, the Gospel, became for the living people in spirit the source and basis of knowledge of both their own heart and knowledge of man in general, and the creation of many "little books".      One of the very rare writers who began to build the building of his artistic creativity on this basis is Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.      What is the main subject of Dostoevsky's thought? This question is easy to answer – a person, his heart, his soul. "And he loved first of all the living human soul in everything and everywhere, and he believed that we are all the race of God, he believed in the infinite power of the human soul, triumphing over all external violence and over every internal fall" – so said V. S. Solovyov at Dostoevsky's grave on February 1, 1881.      But Dostoevsky did not consider man in an ordinary way, not as a majority. He saw his task not in a simple depiction of his life, visible to everyone, not in realism, often reminiscent of naturalism, but in the revelation of the very essence of the human soul, its deepest driving principles, from which all feelings, moods, ideas, and all human behavior arise and develop. And here Fyodor Mikhailovich showed himself to be an unsurpassed psychologist. What is a person in Dostoevsky's understanding?      To answer this question, it is necessary to recall the main points of view that prevailed in the enlightened society of that time. There are three of them.      1. Man is a cunning, sensual and selfish ape, carrying the heritage of his animal ancestors.      2. Man is kind, loving, capable of self-sacrifice, etc. The bad qualities that we notice in man are not properties of his nature, but direct consequences of the development of civilization, which has brought disharmony into man, alienating him from nature, from natural life.      3. Man is neither evil nor good by nature, he is a blank slate, on which only the social environment in all its diversity of factors puts appropriate writings.      Dostoevsky in the essence of his views is very far from all these theories. For him, the first point of view is unnatural, although, apparently, few writers have been able to depict the "bottom" of the human soul with such force and vividness as he did. Dostoevsky does not agree with the second theory either, despite the fact that the very idea of indelible and always acting good and truth in man was leading in all his work. In the "Diary of a Writer" we even read the following: "Evil lurks in a person deeper than is usually supposed." Dostoevsky also sharply criticizes the third theory. He does not agree that "if society is organized normally, then all crimes will disappear at once, since there will be nothing to protest for and everyone will become righteous in an instant." "In no structure of society," he wrote, "will you escape evil... the human soul will remain the same... abnormality and sin come from herself."      Fyodor Mikhailovich has a different view of man, a view that can be called coming from the Gospel.      The "little book" – the Gospel – revealed to him the mystery of man, revealed to him that man is not a monkey or a holy angel, but that image of God, which, although in its God-created nature is good, pure, and beautiful, nevertheless, by virtue of the fall of man, was deeply distorted, as a result of which "thorns and thistles" began to grow on earth in his heart. Thus, in fallen man, whose nature is now called natural, there are both the seeds of good and the tares of evil present at the same time. What is the salvation of man according to the Gospel? In the experienced knowledge of the deep damage of one's nature, in one's personal inability to eradicate this evil, and through this – the effective recognition of the necessity of Christ as one's only Saviour, that is, a living faith in Him. This faith itself arises in a person only through sincere and constant compulsion of himself to do the good of the Gospel and the struggle with sin, which reveals to him his real powerlessness and humbles him.      Dostoevsky's greatest merit lies in the fact that he not only knew his fall, humbled himself and came through the most difficult struggle to the true faith in Christ, as he himself said: "Not as a boy do I believe in Christ and confess Him, but through a great furnace of doubt my hosanna has passed," but also in the fact that in an unusually bright, He revealed this path of the soul to the world in a strong, deep artistic form. Dostoevsky, as it were, once again preached Christianity to the world, and in a way that, apparently, none of the secular writers had done either before or after him.      In humility Dostoevsky sees the basis for the moral rebirth of man and for his acceptance by God and people. Without humility there can be no correction, which is needed by all living without exception, for in all there is evil, and great evil. "If only," says Dostoevsky through the mouth of the prince in "The Humiliated and Insulted," "it could be (which, however, by human nature can never be), if only it could be that each of us could describe all his own ins and outs, but in such a way that he would not be afraid to state not only what he is afraid to say and will never say to people, not only that what he is afraid to say to his best friends, but even what he is sometimes afraid to admit to himself, then such a stench would rise in the world that we would all have to suffocate."      That is why everywhere and everywhere, if not directly in words, then in the entire depicted life of the hero, in his falls and uprisings, Dostoevsky calls on man to humility and work on himself: "Humble your pride, proud man, work in the field, idle man!" Humility does not humiliate a person, but, on the contrary, puts him on the firm ground of self-knowledge, a realistic view of himself, of man in general, since humility is the light thanks to which only a person sees himself as he really is. It is evidence of the great courage of a man who was not afraid to face the most formidable and implacable rival – his conscience. For the selfish and vain, this is beyond his power. Humility is the solid foundation, the salt of all virtues. Without it, they degenerate into hypocrisy, hypocrisy, pride.      This idea is constantly heard in Dostoevsky's work. It is a kind of foundation for him, on which he builds a psychoanalysis of a person, rare in its depth of insight. Hence the extraordinary truth of his depiction of the inner world of man, the innermost movements of his soul, his sin and fall, and at the same time his deep purity and the holiness of the image of God. At the same time, the author never feels the slightest condemnation of the person himself. Dostoevsky puts wonderful words into the mouth of the elder Zosima. "Brothers," the elder instructs, "do not be afraid of the sin of men, love man even in his sin, for this likeness of God's love is the height of love on earth... And do not let the sin of people trouble you in your work, do not be afraid that it will wipe out your work and not allow it to be accomplished. Flee from this despondency... Remember especially that you cannot be anyone's judge. For there can be no criminal judge on earth until the judge himself knows that he is just as criminal as the one who stands before him, and that he is the first to be guilty for the crime of the one standing before him."      But it is not so easy to know. Not many are able to see in themselves "that he is just as much a criminal." Most people think of themselves as generally good. That is why the world is so bad. Those who become able to see that "everyone is guilty for all," to see their personal criminality before the inner law of truth, and repent, are deeply transformed, because they begin to see God's truth, God, in themselves.      And what do all human affairs mean before God! All of them are nothing more than an "onion", about which Alyosha Grushenka ("The Brothers Karamazov") says: "All I have given is an onion in my whole life, only I have virtues." The same thing is said to Alyosha in a dream by his righteous elder Zosima, who was honored to be at the wedding feast of the Lord. The elder approached Alyosha and said to him: "Also, my dear, I am also called, called and called. Having fun. I served the onion, here I am. And many here served only an onion, only one small onion... This state is indeed the state of the Gospel publican, who came out of the temple, according to the word of the Lord Himself, justified.      We see a similar mood in the drunkard Marmeladov ("Crime and Punishment"), when he speaks of the Last Judgment of God: "And He will judge and forgive all, both the good and the evil, and the wise and the humble... And when he has finished over everyone, then he will cry out to us: "Come out, he will say, you also! Come out drunk, come out weak, come out magpies!" and we will all go out without shame, and we will stand. And he will say: "You pigs! The image of the beast and its seal; And the wise shall cry out, and the prudent shall cry out, Lord! And he will say: "Therefore I accept them, most wise, therefore I accept them, prudent ones, because not one of them has considered himself worthy of this"... And He will stretch out His hands to us, and we will fall down... and weep... And we will understand everything! Then we will understand everything... and everyone will understand." Dostoevsky so amazingly transposed the beginning and basis of the Gospel teaching on salvation – "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven" – into the language of modernity: "for not one of them considered himself worthy of it."      Only on this unshakable foundation of "poverty of spirit" is it possible to achieve the goal of the Christian life – love. It is affirmed by the Gospel as the law of life: only in it does it promise the good, the happiness of man and mankind. This love as a healing and reviving force is preached by Dostoevsky in all, one might say, works, he calls people to it.      Of course, we are not talking about romantic love. Dostoevsky's love is the pity of the same Prince Myshkin for the merchant Rogozhin who struck him, it is compassion for his neighbor suffering in body and soul, non-condemnation of him: "Brothers, do not be afraid of the sin of people, love man even in his sin."      Let us recall the final scene from The Brothers Karamazov, when Rakitin, a seminarian, rejoicing evilly, brings Alyosha to Grushenka, hoping to see the shame of the righteous man. But the shame did not happen. On the contrary, Grushenka was shocked by pure love – Alyosha compassion for her. All the bad things vanished from her at once when she saw it. "I don't know," she said to Rakitin, "I don't know, I don't know anything, what he said to me, it affected my heart, he turned my heart upside down... He was the first to feel sorry for me, the only one, that's what! "Why didn't you, cherubim, come before," she turned to Alyosha, falling on her knees before him, as if in a frenzy. "I've been waiting for someone like you all my life, I knew that someone like you would come and forgive me. I believed that someone would love me, disgusting, not only for shame!" "What have I done to you," Alyosha answered, smiling tenderly, bending down to her and taking her hands, "I gave you an onion, one of the smallest onions, only!"      Dostoevsky wanted to show and showed with all the power of his talent that God lives in man, good lives in man, despite all the superficial dirt with which he covers himself. Although he is not an angel in his life, he is not an evil animal in his essence. He is precisely the image of God, but fallen. That is why Dostoevsky does not pronounce judgment on the sinner, because he sees in him a spark of God as a pledge of his resurrection and salvation. Here is Dmitri Karamazov, an eccentric, dissolute man, with a daring and unbridled temper. What is going on in the soul of this terrible person, who is he? The world has pronounced its final judgment on him – the villain. But is this true? "No!" – Dostoevsky asserts with all the strength of his soul. And in this soul, in the depths of it, it turns out that a lamp is burning. Here is what Dmitry confesses to Alyosha, his brother, in one of his conversations: "... I happened to plunge into the deepest shame of debauchery (and this is the only thing that happened to me)... And in this very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be low, mean, but let me also kiss the edge of the robe in which my God is clothed; let me follow the devil at the same time, but I am still Your son, Lord, and I love You, and I feel the joy without which the world cannot stand and be..."      That is why, in particular, Dostoevsky believed so much in the Russian people, despite all their sins. "Whoever is a true friend of mankind," he urged, "who has ever had a heart beating for the sufferings of the people, will understand and excuse all the impassable alluvial mud in which our people are immersed, and will be able to find diamonds in this mud. I repeat: judge the Russian people not by the abominations that they so often do, but by those great and holy things for which they constantly sigh even in their very abomination... No, judge our people not by what they are, but by what they would like to become. And his ideals are strong and holy, and it is they who saved him in the centuries of torment."      How Dostoevsky wanted to show this beauty of the purified human soul, this priceless diamond, which for the most part is all piled up, cluttered, polluted with the dirt of lies, pride and carnality, but begins to sparkle again, washed by tears of suffering, tears of repentance! Dostoevsky was convinced that this is why man sins, that is why he is often evil and bad, because he does not see his true beauty, does not see his real soul. In the materials for "Demons" we find the following: "Christ then came so that mankind would know that its earthly nature, the human spirit, can appear in such heavenly splendor in reality and in the flesh, and not only in a dream and in an ideal, that it is both natural and possible." Kirillov in "Demons" says about all people: "They are not good, because they do not know that they are good. They must know that they are good, and all will immediately become good, every single one." It is about this beauty, which appeared to the spiritually purified gaze of man, that Dostoevsky spoke when he asserted that "beauty will save the world" ("The Idiot").      But it turns out that this saving beauty, as a rule, is revealed to a person in suffering, through the courageous bearing of his cross. It is no accident that suffering occupies a dominant place in Dostoevsky's work, and he himself is rightly called the artist of suffering. With them, like gold fire, the soul is purified. They, becoming repentance, revive the soul to a new life and turn out to be the redemption that every person who is deeply aware of and has experienced his sins and his abominations craves. And since everyone is sinful, then suffering, according to Dostoevsky, is necessary for everyone, like food and drink. And it is bad for the soul that does not feel this need. "If you like," he writes in the Notebook, "a person must be deeply unhappy, for then he will be happy. If he is constantly happy, he will immediately become deeply unhappy." "You will see great sorrow," says Elder Zosima to Alyosha, "and in sorrow you yourself will be happy. Here is a testament to you: seek happiness in sorrow." For through suffering, to which sometimes even terrible crimes lead, a person is freed from his inner evil and its temptations, and again turns to God in his heart, is saved.      Dostoevsky sees this salvation only in Christ, in Orthodoxy, in the Church.      For Dostoevsky, Christ is not an abstract moral ideal, not an abstract philosophical truth, but an absolute, supreme personal Good and perfect Beauty. That is why he writes to Fonvizina: "If someone were to prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and it really were true that the truth is outside of Christ, then I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth." That is why he speaks with such sarcasm through Alyosha Karamazov about pseudo-following Christ: "I cannot give two rubles instead of everything, and instead of 'follow Me' go only to mass." In this case, what really remains of Christ is "a dead image, which is worshipped in churches on feast days, but which has no place in life" [1].      But Christ, according to Dostoevsky's deep conviction, was preserved intact only in Orthodoxy, in the Slavic peoples, and especially in the Russian people. Hence the peculiarity of Dostoevsky's view of the Russian people as a God-bearing people, a people who can and must save Europe – this is "an expensive," in the words of Ivan Karamazov, "cemetery (a cemetery for a long time, and no more)", and with it the whole world. "Everything, everything that the Russian people seek," he writes, "lies for them in Orthodoxy – in Orthodoxy alone, both the truth and the salvation of the Russian people"; "the most important pre-chosen destiny of the Russian people in the fate of all mankind is to reveal the Divine face of Christ, preserved in Orthodoxy, when the time comes, to the whole world that has lost its way."      Why does Dostoevsky write like this? Wasn't Europe Christian? "In Europe," he answers, "there are Christians even now, but there is an awful lot of perverted understanding of Christianity" (Notebook). "In the West," he wrote to N. Strakhov (1871), "Christ has been lost thanks to Catholicism, and that is why the West is falling." Hence the fatal consequences for Europe. A year before his death, Dostoevsky wrote: "Yes, it is on the eve of the fall, your Europe, universal and general. An anthill that has long been created in it without the Church and without Christ, with its moral principle shaken to its foundations, having lost everything common and everything absolute, this anthill that has been created has been completely undermined."      Dostoevsky sees the cause of the spiritual deadening of Europe in the perversion of the very foundations of Christianity in Catholicism. It is this that led the West to a grandiose religious catastrophe in the sixteenth century, and it has now given rise to the great tragedy of European culture. At the same time, Dostoevsky emphasizes: "I am not talking about Catholic religion alone, but about the whole Catholic idea." In The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky reveals his understanding of this idea. He is convinced that Catholicism, in essence, rejected Christ, since it rejected the most important premise of His teaching: the gospel of man's free, and only free, conversion to God, of man's free response to God's love. The Catholic Church, according to Dostoevsky, strives by any means, including violence and cunning, to subordinate man to the power of Rome. And this idea does not come from love for Christ, but from a proud desire for dominion over all mankind. That is, the goal of Catholicism is purely earthly, unspiritual, and therefore it is Christ who most of all hinders its realization by His preaching about love and freedom as indispensable conditions for the attainment of true good by man. Dostoevsky puts a terrible confession into the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor. "I do not want Thy love," he says to Christ, "because I do not love Thee myself. Perhaps you want to hear our secret from my lips, so listen: we are not with you, but with him, this is our secret."      Rejecting the Catholic Church, Dostoevsky at the same time resolutely insists on the need for the Orthodox Church as the unconditional spiritual beginning of life and the bearer of the true culture that Russia should bring to the world. Archpriest Vasily Zenkovsky wrote: "The churching of the whole life is the positive ideal that inspired Dostoevsky and which he understood not as the external subordination of the entire life of the Church (as Catholicism thought), but as the free and internal assimilation by life in all its forms of Christian principles" [2]. But long before him, V. Solovyov said the same thing: "If we want to designate in one word the social ideal to which Dostoevsky arrived, then this word will be... Church" ("The First Speech in Memory of Dostoevsky").      Thus, speaking of Dostoevsky's work, we can say with certainty that his main direction and spirit are evangelical (although from a theological point of view he had some erroneous statements and ideas). Just as the entire Gospel is permeated with the spirit of repentance, the need for man to realize his sinfulness, humility – in a word, the spirit of the publican, the harlot, the thief, who fell down to Christ with tears of repentance and received purification, moral freedom, joy and the light of life – so the whole spirit of Dostoevsky's works breathes in the same place and in the same place. Dostoevsky, it seems, writes only about "poor people", about the "humiliated and insulted", about the "Karamazovs", about "crimes and punishments" that regenerate a person. "Revival," Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) emphasizes, "is what Dostoevsky wrote about in all his novels: repentance and rebirth, sin and correction, and if not, then violent suicide; only around these moods revolves the whole life of all his heroes" [3]. He also writes about children. Children are everywhere in Dostoevsky's works. And everywhere they are holy, everywhere as angels of God in the midst of a terrible, corrupt world. But is not the Kingdom of God children!      The last minutes of Dostoevsky's life are remarkable, revealing to us the spiritual structure of the author of immortal creations. "At 11 o'clock, the throat bleeding repeated. The patient felt extremely weak. He called the children, took them by the hands and asked his wife to read the parable of the prodigal son." This was the last repentance that crowned the far from simple life of Fyodor Mikhailovich and showed the faithfulness of the spirit of his works to the "little book" – the Gospel.      V. Solovyov was right when he said about Dostoevsky in his "Second Speech": "People of faith create life. These are those who are called dreamers, utopians, fools for Christ – they are prophets, truly the best people and leaders of humanity. We commemorate such a person today!"

A. I. OSIPOV, Professor of the Moscow Theological Academy

1. Soloviev V. Vtoraya rech v pamyati Dostoevskogo [The Second Speech in Memory of Dostoevsky] // Sochineniya v 2 t. T. 2. Moscow, 1988. ^

2. Russian thinkers and Europe. Paris, 1995. P. 245. ^

3. Dostoevsky F. M. Sochineniya [Works]. St. Petersburg, 1911. T. 2. P. 469. ^

From the words spoken by Vladimir Solovyov at the grave of Dostoevsky