An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

65. RUSSIA AND EUROPE: (5) DOSTOYEVSKY

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky had, like Gogol, been a protégé of Belinsky. But, again like Gogol, he had broken with him because of his atheism and readiness to subordinate art to propaganda. However, he did not decisively cast off his socialist acquaintances, and his return to conscious Christianity was correspondingly tortuous, slow and punctuated by harsh lessons from life.

Dostoyevsky’s Christian critique of socialism, though not yet fully articulate in the 1840s, had already begun to reveal itself in his relations with Belinsky, of whom he wrote much later: “Treasuring above all reason, science and realism, at the same time he comprehended more keenly than anyone that reason, science and realism alone can merely produce the ant’s nest, and not social ‘harmony’ within which man can organize his life. He knew that moral principles are the basis of all things. He believed, to the degree of delusion and without any reflex, in the new moral foundations of socialism (which, however, up to the present have revealed nothing but abominable perversions of nature and common sense). Here was nothing but rapture. Still, as a socialist he had to destroy Christianity in the first place. He knew that the revolution must necessarily begin with atheism. He had to dethrone that religion whence the moral foundations of the society rejected by him had sprung up. Family, property, personal moral responsibility – these he denied radically. (I may observe that, even as Herzen, he was also a good husband and father.) Doubtless, he understood that by denying the moral responsibility of man, he thereby denied also his freedom; yet, he believed with all his being (much more blindly than Herzen, who, at the end, it seems, began to doubt) that socialism not only does not destroy the freedom of man, but, on the contrary, restores it in a form of unheard-of majesty, only on a new and adamantine foundation.
“At this juncture, however, there remained the radiant personality of Christ Himself to contend with, which was the most difficult problem. As a socialist, he was duty bound to destroy the teaching of Christ, to call it fallacious and ignorant philanthropy, doomed by modern science and economic tenets. Even so, there remained the beatific image of the God-man, its moral inaccessibility, its wonderful and miraculous beauty. But in his incessant, unquenchable transport, Belinsky did not stop even before this insurmountable obstacle, as did Renan, who proclaimed in his Vie de Jésus – a book permeated with incredulity – that Christ nevertheless is the ideal of human beauty, an inaccessible type which cannot be repeated even in the future.
“’But do you know,’ he screamed one evening (sometimes in a state of great excitement he used to scream), ‘do you know that it is impossible to charge man with sins, to burden him with debts and turning the other cheek, when society is organized so meanly that man cannot help but perpetrate villainies; when, economically, he has been brought to villainy, and that it is silly and cruel to demand from man that which, by the very laws of nature, he is impotent to perform even if he wished to…?’
“That evening we were not alone: there was present one of Belinsky’s friends whom he respected very much and obeyed in many ways. Also present was an author, quite young, who later gained prominence in literature [Dostoyevsky].
“’I am even touched to look at him,’ said Belinsky, suddenly interrupting his furious exclamations, turning to his friend and pointing at me. ‘Every time I mention Christ his face changes expression, as if he were ready to start weeping… But, believe me, naïve man,’ he jumped at me again, ‘believe me that your Christ, if He were born in our time, would be a most imperceptible and ordinary man; in the presence of contemporary science and contemporary propellers of mankind, He would be effaced!’”³⁶⁷
The essence of “The Parable of the Grand Inquisitor” is in that scene, with Belinsky in the role of Inquisitor and Dostoyevsky - in that of the silent Christ.
However, Dostoyevsky was not yet ready to break decisively with the socialist camp. As he wrote: “All these new ideas of those days were very appealing to us in Petersburg; they seemed holy in the highest degree and moral, and – most important of all – cosmopolitan, the future law of all mankind in its totality. Even long before the Paris revolution of ’48 we fell under the fascinating influence of these ideas. Already in ’46 I had been initiated by Belinsky into the whole truth of that future ‘regenerated world’ and into the whole holiness of the forthcoming communist society. All these convictions about the immorality of the very foundations (Christian) of modern society, the immorality of religion, family, right of property; all these ideas about the elimination of nationalities in the name of universal brotherhood of men, about the contempt for one’s native country as an obstacle to universal progress, and so on and so forth – all these constituted such influences as we were unable to overcome and which, contrariwise, swayed our hearts and minds in the name of some magnanimity. At any rate, the theme seemed lofty and far above the level of the then prevailing conceptions, and it was precisely this that was tempting…
“The human mind, once having rejected Christ, may attain extraordinary results. This is an axiom. Europe, in the persons of her highest intellectual representatives, renounces Christ, while we, as is known, are obligated to imitate Europe…”³⁶⁸
The revolution of 1848 in Europe, writes V.F. Ivanov, “gave wings of hope to all the antichristian and destructive forces.
“The profound thinker V.A. Zhukovsky, in January, 1848, in an excerpt from a letter, What is Going to Happen, prophetically foretold the bloody chaos of which we are the witnesses in our own days.
“’We live,’ wrote Zhukovsky, ‘on the crater of a volcano which not long ago was giving out fire, which calmed down and which is now again preparing to throw up. Its first lava flow has not yet cooled, and already in its depths a new one is bubbling, and the thunder of stones flying out of the abyss is announcing that it will soon pour out. One revolution has ended, and another stepping on its toes, and what is remarkable is that the course of the last is observing the same order as did the first, in spite of the difference in their characters. The two are similar in their first manifestations, and now, as then, they are beginning with a shaking of the main foundation of order: religion. But now they are doing it in a bolder way and on a broader scale. Then they attack the faith obliquely, preaching tolerance, but now they are directly attacking every faith and blatantly preaching atheism; then they were secretly undermining Christianity, apparently arming themselves against the abuses of Church authorities, but now they are yelling from the roots that both Christianity and the Church and the Church authorities and every authority is nothing other than abuse. What is the aim of the present reformers? – I am speaking about those who sincerely desire what is better, sincerely believe in the reality and beneficence of their speculations – what is the aim of the present reformers?, who are entering on the same path which their predecessors trod, whose end we saw with shuddering, knowing that the desired improvement would never be found there. What is the aim of the present reformers? They themselves do not clearly see it. It is very probable that many of them are deceiving themselves, and, while going forward with banners on which there shine the words of our age: forward, freedom, equality, humanity, they themselves are sure that their path leads straight to the promised land. And perhaps it is fated for them, as for many others of their predecessors, to shudder on the edge or on the bottom of this abyss, which will soon open up under their feet.
“’Behind these preachers of education and progress, who are acting openly, others are acting in secret, who are not blinded, who have a practical aim which they see clearly in front of them: for them it is no longer a matter of political transformation, or of the destruction of privileges and age-old historical formations (that was already accomplished in the first revolution), but simply of the annihilation of the difference between yours and mine, or, more correctly, of turning yours into mine.’”³⁶⁹
The first revolutionary movement in Russia after 1848 was the “Petrashevtsy”, named after its leader, Michael Petrashevsky. He expressed his “realist” views with typically Russian explicitness: "[Naturalism] means a science which holds that by thought alone, without the help of tradition, revelation, or divine intervention, man can achieve in real life a state of permanent happiness through the total and independent development of all his natural faculties. In the lower phases of its evolution, naturalism considers the appearance of the divine element in positive religions to be a falsehood, the result of human rather than divine action. In its further evolution, this science - having absorbed pantheism and materialism - conceives divinity as the supreme and all-embracing expression of human understanding, moves towards atheism, and finally becomes transformed into anthropotheism - the science that proclaims that the only supreme being is man himself as a part of nature. At this stage of its rational evolution, naturalism considers the universal fact of the recognition of God in positive religions to be a result of man's deification of his own personality and the universal laws of his intellect; it considers all religions that reflected the historical evolution of mankind to be a gradual preparation for anthropotheism, or - in other words - total self-knowledge and awareness of the vital laws of nature."³⁷⁰
The Petrashevtsy especially admired Fourier; and on his birthday D.D. Akhsharumov declared: “We venerate his memory because he showed us the path we must follow, he revealed the source of wealth, of happiness. Today is the first banquet of the Fourierists in Russia, and we are all here: ten people, not much more! Everything begins from something small and grows into something big. Our aim is to destroy the capitals and cities and use all their materials for other buildings, and turn the whole of this life of torments, woes, poverty and shame into a life that is luxurious, elegant, full of joy, wealth and happiness, and cover the whole poor land with palaces and fruits and redecorate them in flowers. We here, in our country, will begin its transfiguration, and the whole land will finish it. Soon the human race will be delivered from intolerable sufferings…”³⁷¹
One member of the circle, the proud, silent and handsome Nikolai Speshnev, considered all distinctions between beauty and ugliness, good and evil to be “a matter of taste”. He did not believe in the transformation of Russia from the top, but in a socialist revolution from below, to which end only verbal propaganda was necessary. “I intend to use it, without the slightest shame or conscience, to propagandise socialism, atheism, terrorism, and all that is good.”³⁷² Speshnev formed his own “Russian Society”, which was joined by Dostoyevsky. He called him his “Mephistopheles”, and was fascinated by him. But he was never wholly convinced by him, and continued to believe in Christ…
However, in 1849 the Petrashevtsy, including Dostoyevsky, were arrested – Dostoeyevsky, for reading Belinsky’s Letter to Gogol in public. They were imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress, and then, after a mock-execution, sent to four years’ hard labour in Siberia. The experience – recounted in The House of the Dead – brought Dostoyevsky to repentance. As he wrote to his brother: “In my absolute spiritual solitude, I re-examined the whole of my former life. I scrutinized every minute detail. I thought very carefully about my past. Alone as I was, I judged myself harshly, without mercy. Sometimes I even thanked my fate because it had sent me into solitude, for without it, this new judgement of myself would never have happened…”³⁷³ As St. Ambrose of Optina said: “This is a man who repents!”³⁷⁴
Then, in Siberia, by being “personally classed with villains”, he came to know the Russian people as they really were for the first time. And through them, as he wrote later, “I again received into my soul Christ, Who had been revealed to me in my parents’ home and Whom I was about to lose when, on my part, I transformed myself into a ‘European liberal’.”³⁷⁵ “The moral idea is Christ,” wrote Dostoyevsky. “In the West, Christ has been distorted and diminished. It is the kingdom of the Antichrist. We have Orthodoxy. As a consequence, we are the bearers of a clear understanding of Christ and a new idea for the resurrection of the world… If faith and Orthodoxy were shaken in the people, then they would begin to disintegrate… The whole matter lies in the question: can one believe, being civilized, that is, a European, that is, believe absolutely in the Divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ? (for all faith consists in this)… You see: either everything is contained in faith or nothing is: we recognize the importance of the world through Orthodoxy. And the whole question is: can one believe in Orthodoxy? If one can, then everything is saved: if not, then better to burn… But if Orthodoxy is impossible for the enlightened man, then… all this is hocus-pocus and Russia’s whole strength is provisional… It is possible to believe seriously and in earnest. Here is everything, the burden of life for the Russian people and their entire mission and existence to come…”³⁷⁶
And so Dostoyevsky became, after Pushkin and Gogol, the third great Russian writer to be rescued from European atheism and converted to “the Russian God”, Jesus Christ... Like the other Slavophiles, Dostoyevsky saw the beginning of the European disease in the reforms of Peter the Great. Unlike them, however, he came to believe that this turning to the West was providential – and not only in that enabled Russians to acquire European arts and sciences. “Throughout these hundred and fifty years after Peter we have done nothing but live through a communion with all human civilization, affiliating ourselves with their history and their ideals. We have learned, and trained ourselves, to love the French, the Germans and everybody else, as if they were our brethren – notwithstanding the fact that they never liked us and made up their minds never to like us. However, this was the essence of our reform – the whole Peter cause; we have derived from it, during that century and a half, an expansion of our view, which, perhaps, was unprecedented and cannot be traced in any other nation, whether in the ancient or the new world. The pre-Peter Russia was active and solid, although politically she was slow to form herself; she had evolved unity within herself and she had been ready to consolidate her border regions. And she had tacitly comprehended that she bore within herself a treasure which was no longer existent anywhere else – Orthodoxy; that she was the conservatrix of Christ’s truth, genuine truth – the true image of Christ which had been dimmed in all other religions and in all other nations. This treasure, this eternal truth inherent in Russia and of which she had become the custodian, according to the view of the best Russians of those days, as it were, relieved their conscience of the duty of any other enlightenment. Moreover, in Moscow the conception had been formed that any closer intercourse with Europe might even exercise a harmful and corrupt influence upon the Russian mind and the Russian idea; that it might distort Orthodoxy itself and lead Russia along the path to perdition ‘much in the same way as all other peoples’. Thus ancient Russia, in her isolation, was getting ready to be unjust – unjust to mankind, having taken the resolution to preserve passively her treasure, her Orthodoxy, for herself, to seclude herself from Europe – that is, mankind – much as our schismatics who refuse to eat with you from the same dish and who believe it to be a holy practice that everyone should have his own cup and spoon. This is a correct simile because prior to Peter’s advent, there had developed in Russia almost precisely this kind of political and spiritual relation with Europe. With Peter’s reform there ensued an unparalleled broadening of the view, and herein – I repeat – is Peter’s whole exploit. This is also that very treasure about which I spoke in one of the preceding issues of the Diary – a treasure which we, the upper cultured Russian stratum, are bringing to the people after our century-and-a-half absence from Russia, and which the people, after we ourselves shall have bowed before their truth, must accept from us sine qua non, ‘without which the fusion of both strata would prove impossible and everything would come to ruin.’ Now, what is this ‘expansion of the view’, what does it consist of, and what does it signify? Properly speaking, this is not enlightenment, nor is it science; nor is it a betrayal of the popular Russian moral principles for the sake of European civilization. No, this is precisely something inherent only in the Russian people, since nowhere and at no time has there ever been such a reform. This is actually, and in truth, almost our brotherly fifty-year-long living experience of our intercourse with them. This is our urge to render universal service to humanity, sometimes even to the detriment of our own momentous and immediate interests. This is our reconciliation with their civilizations; cognition and excuse of their ideals even though these be in discord with ours; this is our acquired faculty of discovering and revealing in each one of the European civilizations – or, more correctly, in each of the European individualities – the truth contained in it, even though there be much with which it would be impossible to agree. Finally, this is the longing, above all, to be just and to seek nothing but truth. Briefly, this is, perhaps, the beginning of that active application of our treasure – of Orthodoxy – to the universal service of mankind to which Orthodoxy is designated and which, in fact, constitutes its essence. Thus, through Peter’s reform our former idea – the Russian Moscow idea – was broadened and its conception was magnified and strengthened. Thereby we got to understand our universal mission, our individuality and our role in humankind; at the same time we could not help but comprehend that this mission and role do not resemble those of other nations since, there, every national individuality lives solely for, and within, itself. We, on the other hand, will begin – now that the hour has come – precisely with becoming servants to all nations, for the sake of general pacification. And in this there is nothing disgraceful; on the contrary, therein is our grandeur because this leads to the ultimate unity of mankind. He who wishes to be first in the Kingdom of God must become a servant to everybody. This is how I understand the Russian mission in its ideal.”³⁷⁷