Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism. Paul J. Contino
particular cross through a “descent into the ordinary and commonplace”—flight to America—as I will elucidate fully in Chapter 5.
Mitya provides one example of the way the novel imagines Christ as the novel’s paragon of transformative beauty. In the 1854 letter mentioned in the previous chapter, Dostoevsky declared that he knew “nothing more beautiful” than Christ.85 He then boasted: “if someone succeeded in proving to me that Christ was outside the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, I would sooner remain with Christ than with the truth.” Twenty-five years later, as he wrote The Brothers Karamazov, he saw no need to pose such a hypothetical: here Christ, and all that he stands for, coincides with the truth. With full artistic freedom, Dostoevsky “powerful[ly]” challenges Christ’s truth through Ivan and his Inquisitor (“Notebooks” 667).86 But read as a whole, his final novel fully reflects his faith in the Word made flesh, in Christ who calls persons to conform to the beauty of his image.87
The Beauty of the Icon
The Christian tradition has long understood “beauty” to be one of the names of God.88 Along with goodness and truth, beauty forms a trinity of “transcendentals” intrinsically related with each other and their source in “the hidden ground of love.” As they developed the doctrine of Christ, the church fathers emphasized this interrelationship:
Corresponding to that classical triad, though by no means identical with it, is the biblical triad of Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as he described as having identified himself in the Gospel of John (John 14:6). . . . As one ancient Christian writer [St. Gregory of Nyssa] had put it in an earlier century, “He who said ‘I am the Way’ . . . shapes us anew to his own image,” expressed as another early author [Gregory of Nyssa] said, in “the quality of beauty”; Christ as the Truth came to be regarded as the fulfillment and the embodiment of all the True, “the true light that enlightens every man” (John 1:9); and Christ as the Life was “the source” for all authentic goodness [Augustine]. (Pelikan 7)
As von Balthasar insists, beauty can never be separated from “her sisters” goodness and truth without “an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past . . . can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love” (Form 18). Denigrated in modernity, Dostoevsky retrieves the beautiful in its integral relation to the good and the true. He depicts its radiance in the visage of those who iconically reflect the beauty of Christ.89
In the Orthodox tradition, the icon reminds the viewer of her participation in divine beauty by virtue of her creation as imago Dei, and the divine call to recover her divine likeness. Dostoevsky’s earliest memory—akin to Alyosha’s—was of reciting a prayer before the icon of the Mother of God (Kjetsaa 1). As an adult, Dostoevsky’s Sunday worship was apparently irregular, although it may have become more consistent in later years, perhaps inspired by Anna’s patient example. But from childhood, he would have known the entrance prayer of the Divine Liturgy according to St. John Chrysostom, in which the priest and deacon “go before the icon of Christ, and kissing it, say: ‘We venerate Thy most pure image, O Good One, and ask forgiveness of our transgressions, O Christ, our God’” (5). An appreciation of the icon can help us better understand the role of beauty in the novel, and specifically Zosima’s insistence that “On earth, indeed, we are as it were, astray and if it were not for the precious image of Christ before us, we should be altogether lost, as was the human race before the flood” (276; emphasis added).
The icon lends tangible, visible form to the trans-figured image of the human person. As theologian Leonid Ouspensky observes, the icon “forms a true spiritual guide for the Christian life and, in particular, for prayer” (180), for “holiness is a task assigned to all men . . .” (193).90 Whether the prayerful setting be communal, liturgical prayer or solitary, devotional, the beauty of the icon calls its prayerful beholder to recover her own beauty, to restore her image—in Russian, her obraz, a word Dostoevsky employs often. The icon fixes the viewer’s attention on that which the incarnation has made possible: Christ becomes flesh—lives, dies, rises, ascends, and sends the life-breath of the Spirit. Through Christ, persons recover their divine likeness. The icon affirms the goodness of the created world, but opens “a window” to the uncreated, infinite kingdom, in which human passions are purified and rightly ordered. The icon represents the beauty of the transfigured Christ and the saints who conform to his image.
In his eighth-century defense, St. John of Damascus emphasized that the incarnation provides the foundational warrant for venerating icons. Christ’s embodiment sanctifies all physical reality. Thus, the icon’s material substance of wood and paint can mediate the divine presence, and the image it represents be venerated, not worshipped: “I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter, who became matter for me, taking up His abode in matter, and accomplishing my salvation through matter. ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ It is obvious to everyone that flesh is matter, and that it is created. I salute matter and I approach it with reverence, and I worship that through which my salvation has come. I honor it” (Divine Images 61). Analogous to the sacraments, the icon visibly, tangibly communicates an invisible, intangible grace. In an Orthodox church the iconostasis between nave and sanctuary represents the heavenly community of Christ and the saints. It charges the liminal space between the congregation and the priest who consecrates the bread and wine in the Anaphora or Eucharistic prayer. The Brothers Karamazov can itself be read as a “narrative icon” (Murav 135) as it points to the person’s eternal telos, even as it recalls and sends her back into this life, with all its mundane responsibilities.
As novelistic creator, Dostoevsky is analogous to the divine Creator. He respects the freedom not only of his “creatures,” his characters, but of his readers as well. Thus the many, varied interpretations of a novel in which those like Zosima and Alyosha, who represent their creator’s values, are powerfully challenged by others, like Ivan. In a letter to his editor, Dostoevsky described the Elder Zosima as “a tangible real possibility that can be contemplated with our own eyes” (Letters 470). One approaches the icon contemplatively, receptively. Dostoevsky hoped the reader might be receptive not only to the “iconic” images of Zosima and Alyosha, but to the novel as a polyphonic whole, and that his final work of art would elicit a free response.91
The icon calls its viewer to conversion and renewal: turning, re-turning to God. It calls its viewer to sanctity, to serve as a living icon for others. In understanding this sanctifying process—and its both/and dynamism—I find the sixth-century Sinai icon of Christ Pantocrator (reproduced on the following page) to be uniquely illuminating. This icon was painted in the sixth century, not long after the Council of Chalcedon (451) had forged the definitive statement on the incarnation: Christ is both man and God, finite and infinite, “without separation or confusion.” In it, Christ’s face gazes upon the viewer’s with both gift and summons. Please take a moment to view the icon attentively:
Christ Pantocrator, St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai (used with permission)
Observe the asymmetry of Jesus’ face. From the viewer’s left, Jesus’ face is open, receptive. His eyes gaze into the viewer’s with tenderness, acceptance, and mercy. Here is the redemptive Christ whom Alyosha affirms, just after Ivan’s insistence that no one dare forgive the torturer of an innocent child. Alyosha responds “suddenly, with flashing eyes”: “there is a Being [who] can forgive everything, all and for all, because he gave his innocent blood for all and everything” (213; emphasis in original). But on the viewer’s right side, Jesus’ face seems different: his lip turns slightly down, and his eye seems to judge the viewer and find him wanting. On this side, we are responsible for the violence that blights our world; Jesus’ eye interrogates: what have we done, and what have we left undone? “There is only one means of salvation, then take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men’s sins . . .” (276; emphasis added): Zosima articulates this imperative just before he affirms the “precious”—and salvific—image of Christ. The viewer—and reader—feels a simultaneous release from and imposition of a burden.
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