Dostoevsky’s Philosophical Manifesto

Welcome to the Unsolicited Advice Reading Group! For the next few months we will be tackling Dostoevsky’s longest (and, in my view, greatest) work, The Brothers Karamazov. Our schedule for the next few weeks is as follows:

Sunday 12th July: Book IV: Crack-Ups

Saturday 18th July: Book V: Pro and Contra. Up to chapter 5

Saturday 25th July: Up to the end of Book V

Saturday 1st August: Book VI: The Russian Monk

Sunday 2nd August (6pm UK time): Live Call (Paid Subscribers only)

Today is a very exciting post! If last week the Grand Inquisitor let us see what the “near enemy” of Dostoevsky looks like, then this is potentially the closest thing we get to Dostoevsky writing a full-blown philosophical manifesto. Given that he is a novelist and a journalist, we don’t often get this kind of neat exposition of Dostoevsky’s own philosophical position, but the Elder Zosima is the closest thing we have to a stand-in for his own views, so this section is very illuminating for that, specifically.

The book opens with the Elder Zosima sitting up in bed, with a renewed vigour often seen in people just before they die. With him are his closest companions, including some of the higher-ups at the monastery, but also a little monk called Brother Anfim, who rarely spoke, and was the “meekest of the meek”. And, of course, there is Alyosha. The Elder gives this pronouncement on Alyosha’s future:

“I think of you like this: you will go out beyond these walls, but in the world you will abide as a monk. Many are the adversaries you will face, but even your enemies will love you. Many are the misfortunes that life will bring you, but even with them you will be happy, and you will bless life, and make others bless it with you - which is the most important thing.”

This connects quite strongly with something Zosima said earlier, when he talked about how monks are not exceptional or special people, but rather just approximating how all people really ought to be. Alyosha, ideally, is going to venture out into the world and have a “monkish” attitude, but among ordinary people.

Many of Zosima’s particular beliefs are influenced by the near-death proclamations of his older brother, Markel. Markel was previously a diehard atheist but as his death approached his attitude shifted slightly. He began to adopt a Christian mystical attitude towards life. This included a number of interesting ideas.

The one that most people pick up on is universal responsibility. That is, that we are all responsible for the sins of one another, since we are all part of the same spiritual ocean, and our souls are thus bound together in some indistinct sense. There are a couple of ways we can interpret this. The first is as a descriptive claim, whereby we are responsible for the sins of others because if we were perfect in the same way that Christ was, then we could serve as an example for them, and inasmuch as we have not done this, we have failed in our duties. Another interpretation would be that our kindness and our cruelty redounds through people, with sin begetting sin and selflessness begetting selflessness. Thus, when we contribute to the sum total of sin in the world (which we all inevitably do) we become part of this “sin-network”, and thus enter into responsibility with all others.

I do think that Dostoevsky believed in this descriptive claim, though I do not know whether he thought it was a sensible philosophical position, or a mystical truth that could only be accessed through the pursuit of Active Love (as the Elder Zosima intimates back in book two). However, there is another way to take the claim of universal responsibility, and that is as an ethical one. As I am sure is familiar, Christ is often said to have taken on the “sins of the world”, and for Dostoevsky, the highest spiritual goal we could possibly have is to imitate Christ. Given this, the statements of Markel, and later Zosima, may suggest a normative commitment as much as a descriptive attitude. That is, that the Christian person, regardless of descriptive responsibility, would want to take on the sins of the world, and would not be content to let a single sinner go unsaved. This is an interesting attitude because, of course, it bears more than a passing resemblance to Ivan’s refusal to accept his “ticket” into paradise because of even a single suffering child. This too exemplifies a kind of universal responsibility, or at the very least a universal solidarity, with all other people. Here the idea of “responsibility” for each other’s sins takes on an entirely different meaning. The responsibility is freely piled onto oneself, in order that we, much like Christ, might suffer with one another, and so long as there is someone suffering (where suffering and sin are understood to be closely connected) the true imitator of Christ simply could not be satisfied.

It is also in this attitude of universal responsibility and universal love that Markel gives one of his strangest proclamations:

“‘Mamma,’ he replied to her, ‘do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we don’t want to realize it, and if we did care to realize it, paradise would be established in all the world tomorrow.’”

This is almost impossible to square with the sheer amount of suffering and sin in the world, if we take it at face-value. However, there is another way we can read this idea: as a reaffirmation of the great potential held by mankind to bring about paradise on earth, if only we could let go of the “law of personality” (that is, egoism) and embrace the “law of love” (that is, selflessness). If we realised, that is, that we had it within us to bring about an earthly paradise (as in, say, the dream of the Ridiculous Man), and subsequently all committed to this, then such a paradise truly would come about. Thus, what Markel sees (I think) is that the world itself can be paradise, but that in our inability to see this, or to bring it about, we forgo this paradise in favour of our own egoism. This is an eminently earthly interpretation of paradise, which matches the earthly definition of Hell that Zosima also gives, whereby it is the inability to love.

The connection between these ideas is found just after he talks about the idea of universal responsibility, when he says:

“How could we have lived all this time being angry with one another and knowing nothing of this?”

The idea seems to be that universal responsibility will help to bring about the kind of peaceful paradise that Markel (and subsequently Zosima) is hoping for. Lastly, Markel’s change itself comes with a great spiritual joy. Realising that the world is paradise, he says the following:

“‘All around me there has been such divine glory: birds, trees, meadows, sky, and I alone have lived in disgrace, I alone have dishonoured it all, completely ignoring its beauty and glory.’”

There is a connection here between the gratitude of Markel for the world as a whole, and the spiritual peace he seems to find in his last days. Markel is illustrating the connection drawn earlier by Zosima between Active Love and the felt spiritual ecstacy of his kind of Christianity. When his love extends to cover the entire world, even as he is dying, that is when he can feel most joyful.

After this, the account turns to the life of the Elder Zosima himself. Despite the “seed” of God being sowed in his heart, he finds himself gradually “transformed into a creature almost savage”. Zosima was in the army at this time as an officer, and said that he looked down on the common soldiers. More than that, he and his fellow officers became positively proud of their cruel behaviour, and thought of nothing other than impressing each other and honouring their unit.

In this time, Zosima took a liking to a young woman, who he later learnt was in fact engaged. Inflamed by jealousy, he goaded the fiance into challenging him to a duel. Zosima stormed back to his quarters and lost his temper with his batsman, Afanasy, striking him so hard that he drew blood. And this final act of brutality was too much for Zosima’s conscience to bear. This one evil deed collapsed the entire edifice of his carelessness, and he emerged into the light of day a changed man, almost giddy with his newfound spiritual ecstasy. During the duel he threw away his own pistol, as he no longer cared about his honor, or about avenging himself on this innocent man. He immediately resigned his post, and applied to join a monastery. An interested reader might note that, in rejecting the duel, Zosima is following in the footsteps of a very different Dostoevsky character - Nikolai Stavrogin from Demons.

In any case, Zosima remained in the village he was stationed at for a while, where he met a peculiar man. He was rich, philanthropic, and by all appearances was a profoundly good man, with a young family who he appeared to love dearly. He was struck by the sudden change in the young Zosima, and his willingness to throw the duel.

The man visits Zosima a number of times, and echoes Markel’s ideas about the kingdom of God coming down to us when we realise that the earth itself can be a paradise. However, he is clearly troubled by something, and he confesses to Zosima that he once killed a young woman he had fallen for, and framed one of her servants, who later died of a fever. And

“With that the matter was closed, abandoned to the will of God, and all, judges, police and society alike, remained convinced that the crime had been committed by no one but the deceased servant. And thereupon began the punishment.”

The punishment, of course, being the guilt and separation caused by committing such an atrocious act. The punishment did not come at first, and he tried to bury it all under charitable donations and internal rationalisations. But he finds that there is a nagging doubt now separating him from everyone, even his wife. Their entire relationship is built on a lie - if she truly knew him for what he was, would she love and forgive him? He finds it hard to look at the innocent faces of his children, since the contrast with his own guilt is too much to bear.

When he heard of what Zosima had done, he resolved to confess his crimes. He had toyed with the idea for three years, and now he was going to see it through. He keeps coming back to visit Zosima, sometimes in great anguish, asking why it is that he must confess, even though it would do nothing to bring his victim back, and there is no one falsely imprisoned for the crime. But in the end he does confess, and dies shortly afterwards, seemingly at peace. On his deathbed, he confesses to Zosima that, during one of his visits, he very nearly killed him, in order that no one could hold him to his promise to confess, and so no one could reveal what he did.

There is so much in these little episodes from Zosima’s life, but I think more than anything they show the contagiousness of goodness in Dostoevsky’s work. There is much made of how evil spreads like wildfire in Dostoevsky’s fiction, be that in Demons or in ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, where a small sin ends up precipitating the fall of a prelapsarian people. But here we see the opposite. Markel’s realisation is passed onto Zosima, where it lays suppressed, but then suddenly bursts forth at just the necessary moment to turn his life around, and then in turn it is passed onto this long-suffering murderer, who in turn finds peace on his deathbed because of it. Again this fits nicely with Dostoevsky’s emphasis on universal responsibility. We also revisit some familiar themes from Crime and Punishment about the mysticism of our consciences. The murderer’s wish to confess is resistant to merely instrumental logic: it is not doing anyone any positive benefit, and will cause him great harm, but his conscience is resistant to such entreaties. For Dostoevsky moral psychology quite often has this arational quality to it, and must be approached with the same fear and trembling as God (which makes sense, given how closely these things are tied together for him). In his book Dostoevsky The Thinker, James P. Scanlan points out that in his non-fiction articles, Dostoevsky treats the individual conscience as only slightly less authoritative than Christ Himself on matters moral. Thus, it is unsurprising that there is a level of mysticism worked into his theory of the conscience. Again, this is explored in much more detail in Crime and Punishment.

Finally, we have some more direct observations on matters of faith. Some of this is re-iterating what came before, but some of it is distinctly new.

First, we have the examination of the role of “monk”. There are a couple of things to note here. The first is the following paragraph:

“Meanwhile in their [the monks’] seclusion they are preserving the image of Christ in well-apportioned and undistorted form, in the purity of God’s truth, as it was handed down to them by the most ancient fathers, apostles and martyrs, and when the need arrives they will show that image to the wavering truth of the world. Great is this thought. This star will shine in the east.”

This is just one example of a number of Russo-exceptionalist themes in this book. As a theological position, Dostoevsky holds that Orthodox Christianity is the only kind that has remained unblemished by corrupting factors (as he thinks has indeed happened for Catholicism). As a more national position, Dostoevsky, since probably the late 1850s, if not before then, has held that the Russian people (and specifically the Russian peasantry) are the people naturally closest to God. In particular, he based his own political philosophy on the peasant obshchina, a kind of collective farm. Throughout the 19th century, these collectives were used by both slavophils and socialists as evidence of either Russian specialness or Russian suitability for socialism. This, for Dostoevsky, eventually evolved into his kind of spiritual nationalism-universalism, which we will talk more about in later posts. It deserves its own treatment because it often differs between works, and can be interpreted in numerous ways.

Zosima re-affirms a number of themes we have already visited: that egoism alone is insufficient to get people to form selfless, brotherly communities, and they must be united by Christianity instead, and that the monk is more free than the rich man, precisely because his needs are few and he can live in spiritual joy serving others. The monk may seem to be withdrawn from the world, but in fact he is one of the few people who is not solitary, and truly is living in a brotherly way. That, along with true Christianity, is what the monk is meant to preserve for the rest of us.

If you read an introduction to Dostoevsky, you will often find a division drawn between his earlier works, which pay more attention to social conditions, and agitate for change, and his later, post-imprisonment works, which are more conservative. I have always found this to be an oversimplification, and the following section from Zosima supports my thesis:

“In factories I have even seen children of ten years: unhealthy-looking, stunted, bent and already depraved. An airless hall, clattering machinery, work all God’s day, depraved words and vodka, vodka – is that what is needed by the soul of a child still so young? He needs the sun, childish games and everywhere a radiant example and at least a drop of love. This shall not be, O monks, this torture of children shall not be, rise up and preach this quickly, quickly!”

This comes in the middle of a longer section on drunkenness, but is also clearly a condemnation of working conditions in Russian cities at the time. This is also the most urgent moment of Book VI in tone, illustrating its importance. A few pages later we have this:

“I dream of seeing and indeed already seem to clearly see our future: for it will be that even the most depraved of our wealthy men will end by being ashamed of his wealth before the poor, and the poor man, seeing this humility, will understand and yield to him with joy and with affection respond to his well-apportioned shame. Believe me, this is how it will end: all things are moving towards it. Only in the dignity of the human spirit can there be equality, and this will be understood by our country alone. Were we brothers, there would be brotherhood, but until there is brotherhood never will there be an equal sharing. We preserve the image of Christ, and it shines like a precious diamond to the whole world … May it come to pass, may it come to pass!”

Again, I will write something more on this at some later date, but paragraphs like this illustrate an important point. Dostoevsky is, in some ways, more conservative in his later works than his earlier works, specifically in his slavophilia and his much more trenchant defence of Christianity. But the Christianity he envisages is genuinely radical. He takes issue with the materialists of the 1860s, but not because he is some great defender of the status-quo of 19th century Russia (though he remains committed to a form of Tsarism, at least temporarily), but because he thinks that universal communal brotherhood can only be achieved through real, enacted Christianity. But this itself would be a huge change to the status quo, especially when we consider all the observations from The Idiot about just how unchristian the upper echelons of Russian society had become. If we look at ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ and the ideal society envisaged there, we see that if anything Dostoevsky’s ideas are more radical than your average 1860s nihilist, given that they involve a transformation of the entire human spirit. In general it is a bad habit to try to apply labels with their modern meanings to figures not in our current context, as they are almost always distorting, and this is no different. The later Dostoevsky holds some views we would consider “conservative” and some views we would consider “revolutionary” and some we would consider outright “idealist” (in the non-philosophical sense), but applying any of these labels to his thought as a whole is to make him a caricature.

After this there are a few sections re-iterating what the Elder Zosima has already said in some of his other speeches about the difficulty of loving mankind, and how it is nonetheless a task that must be taken up by the monks, and about the importance of not placing yourself in judgment of others, as that is a very impediment to the kind of spiritual transformation you hope to enact. But then we come to one of Dostoevsky’s most famous lines:

“Fathers and teachers, I think: ‘What is hell?’ I argue thus: ‘The suffering of no longer being able to love.’”

There are two interesting things here. The first is that Zosima remains very much “on the earth” in this description. Although he says that there may be a material hell (that is, a hell of physical torments), he does not go into it, choosing instead to remain in the realm of spiritual psychology. But secondly, it is phrased as the “inability to love” rather than “an inability to be loved”. Both of these are no doubt important for Dostoevsky, but the emphasis is placed specifically on the active love given rather than the love received. This too makes sense given Dostoevsky’s Christianity. Jesus was, famously, disdained and eventually crucified, so the ideal for Dostoevsky cannot be in love received, it must be in love given.

Finally, Zosima isolates pride as the thing that can keep someone from spiritual joy, even in full knowledge of God:

“But they will be insatiable until the end of time and they will reject forgiveness; the God who calls them, they curse. They are unable to contemplate the living God without hatred and they demand that life shall have no God, that God shall destroy himself and all his creation. And they will burn in the fire of their anger eternally, thirsting for death and non-existence. But they shall not receive death”

This has always been a theme in Dostoevsky’s writings. We saw it with the Underground Man, whose petty pride prevents him from connecting with others or changing his spiteful approach to life. In this book there are a number of people it could apply to, and I am glad it is left purposefully ambiguous. But we can think about it specifically in reference to Ivan. Is Ivan being proud in not being able to trust in God with regards to the sufferings of the world, or is he reflecting the admirable normative commitment to universal responsibility and togetherness? I like how if we apply the Elder Zosima’s philosophy to Ivan specifically, we see that he has some traits of Zosima’s ideal, while also having some traits that are antithetical to that ideal. It complicates the picture often presented of Ivan that he is just an “angry atheist” or simply a “rebel against God” embodying “Satanic pride”. If that were the case, I do not think he would be an interesting character.

I hope that, if nothing else, the two things that have come across in this section is the complexity of Dostoevsky’s philosophical ideal, and the complexity of how the different characters in the novel relate to that ideal. We are almost at the midpoint of the novel now, and I tend to think of this chapter, and the death of the Elder Zosima, as the fulcrum on which the story turns. Before, all the characters were being supervised by this morally transcendent figure, standing as an example, and respected even by some of the most depraved among them. Now he is gone, and there is a sense that the fetters of humanity’s basest instincts have been removed. Of course, this mirrors the situation Dostoevsky thinks we are in after Christ’s ascension, with no physical presence, and only the memory of an example to guide us.

But I look forward to chatting about all this and more in tomorrow’s call :).