Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism. Paul J. Contino
to the infinite freedom of God’s grace and to the possibility that a small act, in “great time,”99 may eventually bear fruit (the open). The novel depicts this closed yet open reality of active love. As an artist, Dostoevsky represents the reality of “the open” in his polyphonic relation to his characters, and his portrayal of Zosima’s and Alyosha’s ethically exemplary treatment of other persons: persons are finite yet always free to receive the infinite freedom of divine grace. But Dostoevsky also represents the reality of “the closed” by portraying characters who turn potential into actuality through decision and action. Dostoevsky’s balance of both “the open” and “the closed” is integral to his incarnational realism, and is especially embodied in the novel’s dramatic scenes of confessional dialogue which, as we’ll see, Bakhtin illuminates.
Bakhtin was a both/and thinker, with a keen sense of both the open and closed dimensions of human experience.100 His early work, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, developed a philosophy of personal responsibility that emphasizes closure: To act ethically, one must refuse the realm of theoretical system and ideal, inner potential, and embody decisions in imperfect acts. Every day, people face ethical decisions—usually small, occasionally big. Universal principles may apply to such situations, but only with a concomitant sense of particular circumstance. Bakhtin’s early philosophical work draws upon neo-Kantian and Schelerian ideas,101 but his emphasis upon the particular aligns with the classical Christian conception of prudence or phronesis. As discussed earlier, prudence applies universals to the complex contours of specific situations. Bakhtin employs the helpful metaphor of “signature” in describing a person’s responsibility to discern, act, and “sign”—not only for her actions, but also the particular and perhaps painful circumstances that she is simply given. By refusing to “sign,” a person dwells in a static realm of empty potential, fantasizing any number of possibilities. Dwelling in an eternal realm of “maybe” allows nothing to “be”: love in dreams must be embodied in actual deeds of active love. Signature-refusers are akin to Kierkegaard’s aesthete, floating in an airy yet paradoxically suffocating realm, flying from commitment, ever-ready with an evasive, self-rationalizing “loophole.” Such a life is “non-incarnated” (Act 43).
In contrast, when a person signs for her actions and situation, she becomes “visible,” to use a helpful word that recurs in Rowan Williams’s brilliant study (Dostoevsky 117, 119, 130).102 Persons are unavoidably communal: when a person acts, it’s likely that others will see the act and perhaps be affected by it. For the moment the viewer will “finalize” the person in the light of that act. But such “finalizing” can be liberating. In another early work, Bakhtin celebrated the boundaries that the viewer offers to the acting person. Such boundaries lend a person the form of “rhythm.” As Bakhtin writes, “the unfreedom, the necessity of a life shaped by rhythm is not a cruel necessity, . . . rather, it is a necessity bestowed as a gift, bestowed with love: it is a beautiful necessity” (Author 119). For Sartre (and some contemporary theorists), “the look” the other casts upon me objectifies me, pins me down: thus “hell is other people.” For Bakhtin, the other’s apprehension of my personhood comes as a gift around which my sense of self takes form. Bakhtin is a personalist.103 He recognizes that a person flourishes to the extent that he “signs” for his circumstances and deeds, and accepts the “rhythm” bestowed by others. In his Dostoevsky book, Bakhtin does not employ the specific terms he employed in his earlier philosophical work. But these terms are helpful in observing the ways in which Dostoevsky’s characters resist applying their “signature” or accepting the “rhythm” bestowed by others: the Underground Man in Notes, Raskolnikov until the end of Crime and Punishment, Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, Stavrogin in Demons. Recuperating these earlier terms serves a heuristic purpose by illuminating Dostoevsky’s own personalist vision.
For Dostoevsky’s robust realism points to the possibility of fully realized personhood. Recent studies seek to recover the concept of “person,” and recognize the word’s roots in the Christian tradition. “Person” stands in stark contrast to modernity’s model of the autonomous, voluntaristic subject.104 Philip A. Rolnick analyzes the ways a robust understanding of personhood has been dissolved in the acids of modernity, specifically in neo-Darwinian naturalism and the deconstructive denial of logos and transcendence. Rolnick recovers the patristic conception of the person as it developed in the early church’s understanding of the Trinity, and the outpouring of trinitarian love in Christ’s incarnation. Later, Thomas Aquinas roots his integration of reason and will in these trinitarian and christological sources. Created in the Trinity’s image and likeness, each person is particular—she is unique, differentiated, irreplaceable. But, in her personhood, she is like all other persons in being rationally, lovingly oriented toward both God and neighbor.
For Dostoevsky, to assert solitary, autonomous subjectivity is to refuse personhood as a given, inherently interpersonal reality.105 Like fellow personalist Jacques Maritain, both Dostoevsky and Bakhtin envision the givenness of an embodied person who “tends by nature to communion” (Person 47; emphasis added). By nature, the person is teleologically oriented toward both the common good and communion with God. Thus Bakhtin’s description of Dostoevsky’s ontology: “To be means to communicate.” A person is “nonself-sufficient”: “To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is always and wholly on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another” (“Reworking” 287). For Bakhtin, the words one speaks are necessarily shared, infused not only with the speaker’s sense of his listener but by the chorus of speakers he’s heard throughout his life. Persons change. And yet an essential, created “true self” remains real. When confessional dialogues succeed, they manifest what Bakhtin calls an encounter of the “deepest I with another and others” and reveal “the pure I from within oneself” (“Reworking” 294; emphasis added).
What is this “deepest I” or “true self”? I read Bakhtin here as elliptically signaling106 Dostoevsky’s Christian belief that a person remains grounded in the loving being of her Creator. Her “deepest I” reflects the divine image. Her pilgrim hope is to recover her divine likeness.107 The deep, “pure I” that Bakhtin discerns in Dostoevsky is not a Platonic form, divorced from material and social realities. It is not Descartes’s “I am” asserted through solitary introspection. Rather, the “deepest I” signifies a person who accepts his ordinary life among others, both receptive and available to others, and who sustains a “good taste of self” and a “realistic imagination” (Lynch, Faith 133), capable of “spiritually relevant [and] morally productive communicative efforts” (Wyman 4). Such a person accepts the twin realities of freedom and necessity, and the “third,” the ever-present reality of grace. Lynch writes that “some good taste of the self, as it is now, no matter how small the taste . . . will help bridge the gap between the actual and the promise” (Faith 130; emphasis added). The deepest, truest self is a graced gift, both actual and promised.
The Brothers Karamazov suggests that the patristic and monastic traditions offer indispensable practices that abet the recovery of one’s “deepest I” or “true self.” The novel’s narrator describes the monastic means of “self abnegation” in order “to attain the end of perfect freedom.” The narrator specifies that end: to find “their true selves” (30). Here too the work of Thomas Merton, well-known twentieth-century Cistercian monk (and lover of The Brothers Karamazov), can be illuminating—especially in an understanding of the novel’s description of Alyosha as “a monk in the world” (247). Merton wrote for countless readers outside the monastery, and understood that the “true self” could be discovered only in a person’s dying and rising and life in Christ. The person thus recovers the likeness into which he was created. Like Zosima—who, he admitted to Dorothy Day, “can always make me weep” (Ground 138)—Merton also believed that all are called to such self-abnegation, to be “monks in the world,” “contemplatives in action.” As he writes in Contemplative Prayer, “the Zosima type of monasticism can well flourish. . . even in the midst of the world” (28). Merton’s description of the “true self,” “the ascetic and contemplative recovery of the lost likeness,” entails small spiritual victories that any person may seek in the goal of “overcoming of conflict, anxiety, ambivalence, compulsiveness and the radical, repressed psychological