Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism. Paul J. Contino
insistence upon personal unfinalizability versus your finalization. With a firmer sense of personhood and a better “taste of self,” I wouldn’t be so sensitive. Bereft of it, I grab a loophole: “I saw others running away. Some of them needed my help.” Squirming to retain my unfinalizability—“I’m not really a coward!”—I deny the freedom I exercised when I chose to run. I erase my “signature” and lose the opportunity to bring closure to one part of my life. The more habitually I grab a loophole, the less free I become.
Dostoevsky depicts numerous such fractured confessions in his work. Although he offers no sustained analysis of The Brothers Karamazov, Bakhtin’s close analysis of the narrator’s confession from Notes from Underground offers a heuristic that can be applied to his final novel. Bakhtin observes that “from the very first the hero’s speech has already begun to cringe and break under the influence of the anticipated words of another . . .” (Problems 228). He thus flees reality. He begins with a self-description, a pause, and a second self-description: “I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.” His first utterance is accurate: “I am a sick man.” But in his pause, the reader can imagine the Underground Man casting a “sideward glance” at his listener, anticipating her forming an evaluation (“poor man, he needs help”). The Underground Man does seek pity from his listener. But simultaneously he hates his listener (to whom he has now become “visible”) for the privileged position from which she offers her sympathy. He recoils, and tries to destroy his need for her by insisting that he alone can speak any final word about himself: “I am a spiteful man.” But this is a “false ultimate word” for again the Underground Man looks at his listener, and cringes in anticipation: what if she should agree, and respond, “Yes, you really are spiteful.” The Underground Man has his “noble loophole” (67) at hand as he asserts his capacity for his “lofty and beautiful dreams” (65).
The Underground Man refuses to simply acknowledge his deeds and resolve to change. He could say: “I’ve been spiteful in the past, but would like not to be in the future.” “[S]uch a soberly prosaic definition [of himself] would presuppose a word without a sideward glance, a word without a loophole . . .” (Problems 232). By refusing to admit his ordinary human imperfection, the Underground Man refuses to live healthily with others. Perversely, he asserts his freedom by ranting that only he himself can have the final word about himself, even as he compulsively glares at the other from the corner of his eye. He is “caught up in the vicious circle of self-consciousness with a sideward glance . . . obtrusively peering into the other’s eyes and demanding from the other a sincere refutation. . . . The loophole makes the hero ambiguous and elusive even for himself. In order to break through to his self the hero must travel a very long road” (Problems 234; emphasis added). The “very long road” to his “true self”—his “deepest I”—requires humility, the virtue that grounds love. Liza offers him love, and he rejects her cruelly. Willfully, he persists in scrawling his notes, which an outside editor cuts off arbitrarily.121
Other characters in Dostoevsky’s fiction employ confession as a meretricious means toward self-justification, punishment, aggrandizement, or exhibition. Robin Feuer Miller analyzes these and uncovers Dostoevsky’s implicit critique of Rousseau, whose Confessions stands in stark contrast to St. Augustine’s: “In Dostoevsky’s canon . . . the literary—bookish—written confession most often tends to be, to seem self-justification, or to aim at shocking the audience. But Dostoevsky does concede that the choice of an audience is important, and successful, genuine confessions do occur—witness Raskolnikov with Sonya, or ‘the mysterious visitor’ with the elder Zosima” (“Rousseau” 98). Julian Connolly highlights Dostoevsky’s “characteristically multifaceted way [of showing] both the shining potential of an effective confession and the frustration and suffering that result from a perversion of the confessional impulse” (“Confession” 28). Fellow novelist J. M. Coetzee concludes that “Dostoevsky explores the impasses of secular confession, pointing finally to the sacrament of confession as the only road to self-truth” (230).
But Dostoevsky never depicts the actual sacrament of confession. In fact, Father Zosima is actually accused by “opponents” of “arbitrarily and frivolously degrad[ing]” the sacrament of confession by attending to the many who come to the monastery “to confess their doubts, their sins, and their sufferings, and [to] ask for counsel and admonition” (31), apart from the sacrament’s traditional form. Nevertheless, Zosima’s encounters with his visitors are portrayed as sacramental. They are penetrated by divine grace. Zosima and Alyosha help their confessants to step out of their vicious circles, to humbly accept their “visibility” before others, and to speak with clarity and resolve. To each, they bring a Christ-like authority.
Their authority lies both in their faith and in their profound capacity to be attentive to others. In stressing the “penetrative” quality of their authoritative words, Bakhtin draws from Ivanov’s Freedom and the Tragic Life, which emphasizes “proniknovenie, which properly means ‘intuitive seeing through’ or ‘spiritual penetration’ . . . . It is a transcension of the subject. In this state of mind we recognize the Ego not as our object, but as another subject. . . . The spiritual penetration finds its expression in the unconditional acceptance with our full will and thought of the other-existence—in ‘thou art’” (26–27). The confessor’s attentiveness allows him to discern the “pure I from within” the confessant; his authoritative discourse penetrates and is received by the confessant as “internally persuasive” (Discourse 342).
Deep attention requires the relinquishment of distraction and self-absorption. In her seminal essay on “School Studies,” Simone Weil stresses the kenotic dimension of attentiveness: “The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this” (115; emphasis added). Ivanov also employs the Greek word kenosis: “If this acceptance of the other existence is complete; if, with and in this acceptance, the whole substance of my own existence is rendered null and void (exinanito, κένωσις) then the other existence ceases to be an alien ‘Thou’; instead, the ‘Thou’ becomes another description of my Ego” (27). But as Bakhtin would insist, and as Alina Wyman extensively demonstrates, kenotic, Christ-like love or “active empathy” does not entail self-obliteration: “Incarnation is seen as a model of an active existential approach to one’s neighbor” (Wyman 6).
The concept of kenosis is, of course, central to the theological understanding of Christ’s incarnation, and is especially pronounced in the Russian Orthodox tradition.122 The locus classicus is the letter to the Philippians in which Paul commends Christ’s “self-emptying” as exemplary:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,but emptied himself,taking the form of a slave,being born in human likeness. And being found in human form,he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name,so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2: 5–11)123
In The Russian Religious Mind, George P. Fedotov stresses the importance of kenotic spirituality in Russian Orthodoxy and traces its roots to two eleventh-century sources: first, to the cult surrounding the politically motivated murder of the Princes Boris and Gleb, who treated their murderers with humility and “forgiving nonresistance” (101), and so were canonized as saints; second, to the life of Saint Theodosius, who was born rich but willingly wore poor clothes and worked in the fields with slaves. As a monk, he opened up relations between the monastery and the lay world; he began the long tradition (of which Zosima is exemplary) of monks serving as confessors for lay people.124 Dostoevsky wrote, “‘In childhood I heard these narratives myself, before I even learned to read.’ These stories of the lives of the saints were no doubt steeped in the special spirit of Russian kenoticism—the glorification of passive, completely non-heroic and non-resisting suffering, the suffering of the despised and humiliated Christ—which is so remarkable a feature of the Russian religious