Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism. Paul J. Contino
then and will not dispute them. 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 undone and altogether lost, as was the human race before the flood. Much on earth is hidden from us, but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot apprehend the reality of things on earth. God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up, but what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think. (276; emphasis added)
While he acknowledges that “much is hidden,” Zosima affirms that we can apprehend “the reality of things on earth” by sustaining “a precious mystic sense of our living bond with . . . the higher heavenly world,” the seeds of which have been sown in creation. Christ’s incarnation follows the creation: “The Word” (whom Ivan resists [203]) “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Thus “the precious image of Christ”46 re-sacralizes reality and remains present in the church, the body of Christ—in its unlikely saints, and in the ecclesial forms of word, sacrament, and icon.
Some Orthodox critics, such as Sergei Hackel, have found the novel to be insufficiently ecclesial. Closer examination suggests otherwise. For example, Zosima recalls attending the Divine Liturgy at the age of eight. During Holy Week, he sees sunlight streaming through “the narrow little window,” and “consciously received the seed of God’s word in [his] heart” (255). Decades later and near death, Zosima longs for the sacraments: “he desired to confess and take communion at once” and then receives extreme unction (145). The church reflects and mediates the precious image of Christ, and Zosima recognizes Christ as the grain of wheat that has fallen to bring forth much fruit (John 12:24). Divine love sows (Matt 13:18–23) “seeds from other worlds” that sustain persons’ participation in Christ’s pattern of descent and ascent. In cooperative effort, through the work of love grounded in grace, they too bring forth much fruit (John 15:8).
Christ’s “precious image” propels its beholder into active participation in what theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar calls the “theodrama” in which the Creator’s infinite freedom fosters the finite freedom of God’s beloved creatures. God’s sustaining presence provides the warrant for persevering in the work of responsible active love. As Augustine emphasized, love builds on humility. It accepts epistemological and other limits, and rejects the defensive impulse to justify self, blame the world, and thus share the “pride of Satan.” Through experience, a person learns to discern reality more clearly, to respond appropriately (“Know measure, know the proper time, study that” [279]),47 and to do so decisively (“If you remember in the night as you go to sleep ‘I have not done what I ought to have done,’ rise up at once and do it” [277]). However one interprets the contours of reality at any particular time, the real remains founded upon what Thomas Merton called the “hidden ground of love.”48 Our “roots” lie here, in worlds Zosima describes as “heavenly,” “higher,” and “mysterious” (276).
Zosima’s realism attends to both the limits and graces found in quotidian life. Finitude curbs the pilgrim’s rough path to eternity. By accepting responsibility in our particular time, place, and community, we discern glimpses of transcendent beauty, of “paradise” (249), often unexpectedly. Zosima articulates a both/and eschatology: paradise is both here and yet to arrive. Faith in eternal beatitude incorporates a vision of life’s goodness, here and now. Incarnational realism suspects the romantic, utopian, sentimental, and apocalyptic.49 It not only “confesses the reality of the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ” (Moore 9), but sees all beings as participating in the integral realities of Trinity and Incarnation.
The second passage to which I will point occurs early in the novel, as the narrator introduces Alyosha as a “realist.” Holding up the apostle Thomas, he suggests that Alyosha’s realism not only accepts miracles, but that it’s integrally related to his faith in Christ’s resurrection:
Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh, no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. . . . Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle, but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe until he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, “I shall not believe except I see.” (28)
For Thomas, as for Alyosha, beholding Christ’s risen image fosters an already-present faith in the Word made flesh.50 Faith grounds incarnational realism: Thomas can see the physical and spiritual reality of the risen Christ because he believes. So too Alyosha who thus counters the “unbelieving realism” of Rakitin. Egotism blinds Rakitin to the genuine spiritual transformations, “resurrections” of others.51 His materialism52 reduces human freedom to the chemical reactions of nerve cells (497).53 At the end of the catalytic “Onion” chapter, in which Alyosha and Grushenka image Christ for each other, Rakitin sneeringly calls their encounter a “miracle” (308). In fact, it is. Faith lends vision to believers like Zosima, Alyosha, Mitya, Grushenka and others, giving them the “ability to see what God chooses to show and which cannot be seen without faith” (von Balthasar, Form 175).
Of course, the life of faith is not free of doubt. Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that one of the most “pure and profound examples of confessional self-accounting . . . may be found” in the prayer of the father with the possessed child who “said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief” (Mark 9:24) (Author 145).54 Given the crucible through which he passed, Dostoevsky understood this father’s prayer. Most believers do. But as James P. Scanlan observes, while Dostoevsky doubted, he never actively disbelieved.55 Like Thomas, Dostoevsky believed in his “secret heart.” His faith enabled him to see the reality of human participation in the death and resurrection of Christ, which he invokes in the novel’s final pages and elsewhere.56
In the narrator’s “midrash” on John 20, Thomas’s beholding of the risen Christ fosters Thomas’s faith, but he sees because he believes. So too Alyosha: he discerns the spiritual dimension of reality in ways that the materialist Rakitin refuses. As do others in the novel, Alyosha speaks of having been “risen up,” as when he declares to Grushenka, “You’ve raised my soul from the depths” (302). The imprisoned Mitya avows that “a new man has risen up in me” (499). Rakitin witnesses the “resurrections” of both Alyosha and Mitya, but disbelief blinds him to the miracle embodied in both. Rakitin is unwilling to open himself to any gracious surprise that may exist outside his egocentric consciousness. He is a rationalist, a “theoretician.” Victor Terras elucidates: “A ‘realist’ according to Dostoevsky is a person who lives and thinks in terms of immediately, or intuitively, given reality. The opposite, then, is the ‘theoretician’ (teoretik), who seeks to create and to realize a subjective world of his own” (Companion 137).
In Thomist terms, the realist’s attunement to “given reality” enables a capacity for prudential action. Josef Pieper writes: “Reality is the basis of the good, . . . to be good is to do justice to objective being” (“Reality” 112); prudence “is the proper disposition of the practical reason insofar as it knows what is to be done concretely in the matter of ways and means” (163). Prudence attends to the context of “particular realities and circumstances which ‘surround’ every individual moral action” (166). Through experience, a prudent person learns to apprehend reality more clearly, and to respond more decisively.
Without prudence, a person cannot act virtuously, cannot flourish. Rather than egocentrically projecting a predetermined schema upon reality, prudence remains receptively open to reality. Aristotle’s discussion of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics is seminal: “prudence is a state grasping the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about things that