Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism. Paul J. Contino
are better than others; Ivan’s wish for his father’s death corrodes his capacity for commitment. Contemporary psychologists corroborate Zosima’s insight: contemplating a change is the first step in the process of change.30
But finally, after prudentially reaching a decision, one must act. As Zosima makes clear, if an overweening desire for others’ “approbation” takes precedence over integrally made decisions, one’s “whole life will slip away like a phantom” (55).31 The Grand Inquisitor reveals the destruction wrought by the univocal: his proclaimed “love of humankind” masks his contempt for persons, and his inclination to annihilate them. His demonic dehumanization foreshadows the totalitarian horrors of recent history. In Zosima’s (and Dostoevsky’s) imagination, hell is the refusal to love. In both this world and the next, hell has an exit, but as an existential condition remains a real option. Some refuse the way out, and for them “hell is voluntary” (279).32 The univocal imagination can lead to such hell.
The equivocal imagination is similarly infernal. It distorts the real by seeing in it nothing but intractable difference. Rather than imposing a false unity, the equivocal imagination relishes the mess, with a perverse amalgam of willful jouissance and Sartrean nausea. It rejects the unity, wholeness, and harmony that are given, but that also emerge out of the slow work of active love. Ethically, equivocation rejects the ordinary bonds that comprise human personhood: responsibilities to family, friends, and the common good. In the novel, Ivan and the illegitimate, unacknowledged fourth brother, Smerdyakov, exemplify equivocation. Ivan articulates the nihilistic vision (65) and Smerdyakov enacts it (531): “if there is no immortality [i.e. heaven, theosis, the telos of communal beatitude], there is no immorality. Everything is permitted” (65; emphasis added). In the novel, the equivocal imagination produces a “love of disorder,” motivated by willful, irrational self-assertion. Ivan and Smerdyakov, the younger Grushenka, Katerina, and Lisa melodramatically luxuriate in lacerating both themselves and others. They thus oppose the incarnational work of active love.
Janus-faced, the univocal and equivocal imaginations comprise a refusal of reality. By rejecting the ontological reality of the “hidden ground of love,” both reject unity within diversity. In place of that ontology they assert an epistemology that projects upon and cuts “against the grain” (545) of the real.33 The univocal compels order; the equivocal exacerbates disorder. Both reject reality as grounded in God’s self-giving love. Both choose “the gallows”: violence toward others and self.34
The “analogy of being” has been described as the “fundamental Catholic form” (Przywara 348). As a lifelong Catholic, I’m aware that my partiality to the novel’s analogical dimension stems partly from my rootedness in that tradition.35 The many forms of Catholicism—liturgical, doctrinal, cultural, intellectual—in-form my reading of Dostoevsky’s novel. As Appendix I illustrates, a wide array of notable Catholic writers have deeply resonated with Dostoevsky’s novels. Of course, the Russian novelist (and nationalist) wrote withering critiques of both Catholicism and Protestantism. Dostoevsky believed that through the truth of Orthodoxy “the star [would] arise in the East” (62) and save the world.36 I approach Dostoevsky’s classic with a degree of readerly “outsideness” and hermeneutic “prejudice.” But as Bakhtin and Gadamer suggest, such a readerly position can be hermeneutically fruitful.37 Furthermore, Catholicism and Orthodoxy share a sacramental tradition and an understanding that analogy entails both likeness and even greater unlikeness.38 In both their cataphatic and apophatic forms, Orthodoxy and Catholicism evince the incarnational realism I emphasize in my reading of the novel.
Incarnational Realism
“Realism” is a word with a complex literary, philosophical, and theological valence to which I cannot do justice here. Suffice it to say “incarnational realism” refers not only to the late-nineteenth-century literary genre in which Dostoevsky writes, but to his philosophical/theological belief that the human mind is capable of apprehending the world as it is ontologically, even with our epistemological limitations and inheritance of “social constructions.” As literary scholar Susan Felch writes, the world outside of us “impinges upon us and sets limits to our ways of seeing, being, and acting in the world” (25). And we are ourselves limited by our particularity of perspectives; thus Susan’s term, “perspectival realism.” Realism must be “critical”; theologian N. T. Wright defines “critical realism” as: “a way of acknowledging the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the thing known as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’) while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality is through the spiraling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence ‘critical’)” (35). And, here, in part, is sociologist Christian Smith’s description:
Critical realism’s central organizing thought is that much of reality exists independently of human consciousness of it; . . . that humans can acquire a truthful though fallible knowledge and understanding of reality through various forms of disciplined conceptualization, inquiry, and theoretical reflection . . . [and] that knowledge and understanding of the truths about reality position knowers to critically engage the world in normative, prescriptive, and even moral terms . . . and [to] intentionally try to shape the world for the better. (92–93)39
Ethically, realism entails the indispensable practice of prudence. Through prudence we become more discerning, more responsible. By degrees, we become better able to receptively apprehend and respond to the real.40 In ordinary parlance, we aim to “be realistic.” Aware of human limits, we set practical, attainable goals—and (when it’s prudent to do so!) implore those whom we care about to “get real.” Consider Zosima’s practical advice to Fyodor: “If you can’t close all [your taverns], at least two or three” (43; emphasis added). You have to start somewhere. And for Dostoevsky, God’s grace, which sustains reality itself, gives us the strength to begin again, to apprehend and respond to divine love. Moments after counseling Fyodor, Zosima exhorts a woman in despair to have faith, to know “that God loves you as you cannot conceive, that He loves you with your sin, in your sin” (50).
Textual examples such as these help clarify Dostoevsky’s vision of incarnational realism. In this chapter I’ll present three passages from The Brothers Karamazov in the hope of providing a clearer sense of what Dostoevsky meant when he insisted “I am only a realist in a higher sense, i.e., I depict all the depths of the human soul.”41 Dostoevsky portrays the depths of human personhood, and envisions creation in the light of “incarnational realism.”
The first passage is from Book 6, which records teachings of the Elder Zosima spoken in “a last effort of love” (248). Read in full, this passage offers “what is probably the master key to the philosophical interpretation, as well as to the structure, of The Brothers Karamazov” (Terras, Companion 259).42 As a whole, Dostoevsky’s novel gives narrative embodiment—word made flesh—to the vision articulated by Zosima.43 Heard as a symphonic whole, the novel renders reality as “being as communion,”44 “the coinherence of creation with God and of creatures with one another” (Barron 145). More simply, the novel offers a practical spirituality to anyone who senses this “coinherence,”45 and desires to respond to it with the gritty work of active love. Here are Zosima’s words:
My friends, pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of heaven. And let not the sin of men confound you in your doings. Fear not that it will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished. Do not say, “Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and we are lonely and helpless, and evil environment is wearing us away and hindering our good work from being done.” Fly from that dejection, children! There is only one means of salvation, then take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men’s sins, that is the truth, you know, friends, for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for all men, you will see at once that it is really so, and that you are to blame for everyone and for all things. But throwing your own indolence and impotence on others you will end by sharing the pride of Satan and murmuring against God. Of the pride of Satan what I think is this: it is hard for us on earth to comprehend it, and therefore it is so easy to fall into error and to share it, even imagining that we are doing something grand and fine. Indeed many of the strongest feelings and movements of our nature we cannot comprehend on earth. Let that