Dostoevsky's Father Zossima on Freedom

Since I started working on my first post this summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom. I’ve specifically been focused on the question, “Are Christians really more free than non-Christians?”

In my first post, I wrote that “man without Christ [is] a bondservant to nature and man with Christ [is] a prince of Heaven.” I went on to say that “without God, everyone is bound to natural desire.” Though we can choose between our numerous desires for food, safety, and the like, we can’t escape our nature apart from Christ.

I recently read a section of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov about this very topic. (I’m currently reading The Brothers K for the first time.) In the passage, Alyosha Karamazov is recording the last sayings of Father Zossima, an Orthodox monk and elder who serves as a spiritual father to Alyosha. I’ll excerpt the relevant parts on freedom:

Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honour and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it. We see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunkenness. . . .

And it's no wonder that instead of gaining freedom they have sunk into slavery, and instead of serving the cause of brotherly love and the union of humanity have fallen, on the contrary, into dissension and isolation . . . For how can a man shake off his habits, what can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

The monastic way is very different. Obedience, fasting and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real, true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God's help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy. Which is most capable of conceiving a great idea and serving it—the rich man in his isolation or the man who has freed himself from the tyranny of material things and habits?

In this passage, Father Zossima contrasts two views of freedom. One view is that freedom is “the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires.” Father Zossima claims that the rich people with this belief “live only for mutual envy” while the poor “drown . . . their envy in drunkenness.” For both the rich and the poor, this path leads not to freedom but “into slavery,” as well as “dissension and isolation.”

The other view—“the monastic way”—holds that “obedience, fasting and prayer” lead to “real, true freedom.” This freedom is a “freedom of spirit,” which, admittedly, sounds like it could be fake. Thankfully, Father Zossima provides a way to contrast these two views through a revealing question: “Which is most capable of conceiving a great idea and serving it—the rich man in his isolation or the man who has freed himself from the tyranny of material things and habits?”

I think Father Zossima’s question gives us a new way to think about freedom: freedom is the capability to choose and follow one’s own goals, the capability to “[conceive] a great idea” and then, importantly, “[serve] it.” This involves both one’s reason and one’s will. (This is by no means the only way to think about freedom.)

The Christian life, being built around a great idea (the promise that God will eventually make all things new) and requiring self-control and endurance, produces this freedom in Christians. James, brother of Jesus, writes, “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (James 1:22). So Christians are trained not only to think of great ideas, but also to serve those ideas with their wills, giving them “real, true freedom.”