Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism. Paul J. Contino
entails “deliberation . . . that accords with what is beneficial, about the right thing, in the right way, and at the right time”; finally, prudence is “the eye of the soul, [and] requires virtue in order to reach its fully developed state; . . . full virtue cannot be acquired without prudence” (1140b–1144b). Pieper says that for St. Thomas, who reads Aristotle through the eyes of faith, “‘reason’ means . . . nothing other than ‘regard for and openness to reality,’ and ‘acceptance of reality.’ And ‘truth’ is to him nothing other than the unveiling and revelation of reality, of both natural and supernatural reality” (Cardinal 9). Pieper defines prudence as “the perfected ability to make decisions in accordance with reality [and] . . . the quintessence of ethical maturity” (Cardinal 31). Fellow Thomist Jacques Maritain, citing Claude Tresmontant, emphasizes the realism inherent in practical reason: “[I]f reason is not constituted a priori, if the principles belonging to reason are in fact drawn from the real itself through our knowledge of the real, then one need hardly be astonished if there is accord between reason and the real. . . . Rationality is not an order or a structure constituted a priori, but a relation between the human mind and the real . . .” (Peasant 109).57
Practical reason attends to “the rough ground,”58 the gritty textures of everyday reality and the graces to be found there. Upon first impression, Dostoevsky’s intensely emotional characters don’t seem to be characterized by “reason.” His great biographer Joseph Frank claims that during the time he wrote The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky saw as “central” “the conflict between reason and faith—faith now being understood very sharply as the irrational core of the Christian commitment” (Prophet 570).59 For Frank, Dostoevsky’s understanding of Christian hope was “justified by nothing but what Kierkegaard called a ‘leap of faith’ in the radiant image of Christ the Godman” (A Writer in His Time 859). But for all the existential anguish of his characters, I see Dostoevsky’s vision—and most fully so in his final novel—as bearing a deeper affinity to Thomas Aquinas’s emphasis on practical wisdom forged in communal relations than to Kierkegaard’s stress on absurdity and subjectivity. At least in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard praises an image of faith that suspends the ethical and remains incommunicable to others: when Abraham sets out to journey to Mount Moriah with Isaac, he cannot tell Sarah of his plans. Nor (Kierkegaard would argue) can he tell her what happened there when he returns home.60 In contrast, The Brothers Karamazov emphasizes a grace-infused yet communicable ethic of active love. The practice of active love itself fosters faith, and those who extend it to each other experience mutual comprehension. Certainly the novel has its apophatic dimension: no orthodox understanding of Christian faith can lack it.61 But the apophatic—which emphasizes God’s transcendence by naming what God is not—is consistent with an understanding of analogy that affirms both similarity and dissimilarity between creature and Creator. As David Bentley Hart notes:
[A]ll the major theistic traditions insist at some point that our language about God consists mostly in conceptual restrictions and fruitful negations. “Cataphatic” (or affirmative) theology must always be chastened and corrected by “apophatic” (or negative) theology. We cannot speak of God in his own nature directly but at best only analogously, and even then only in such a way that the conceptual content of our analogies consists largely in our knowledge of all the things God is not. (Experience 142)
Dostoevsky is always alert to the apophatic, as some of his best commentators have elucidated.62 Yet The Brothers Karamazov’s cataphatic dimension consistently demonstrates the human capacity to discern God’s will and to communicate it to others. Zosima’s counsel to his fellow monks is consistently realistic and reasonable. Even when young, Dostoevsky insisted that he saw “nothing more reasonable” than Christ.63 Consistently, he rejected rationalism—the “rational egoism” of his contemporary Chernyshevsky64 and the positivism of Rakitin—as a de-formation of reason that dissolves the freedom of persons as images of God.65 Freedom entails the practice of virtue, most prominently, active love, and, as A. Boyce Gibson understatedly noted almost fifty years ago, “the faith displayed in ‘active love’ is not so far from being ‘reasonable’” (211).66 The Brothers Karamazov presents active love as graced, reasonable, and possible.
Dostoevsky’s conception of faith cannot be reduced to an act of emotional will, a voluntaristic “leap.” Voluntarism exalts the human will, and in Dostoevsky’s world the unfettered, irrational will leads to demonic violence and un-freedom. Aware of impinging limits, incarnational realism fosters freedom in its uniting of “reason and will, knowledge and love in the act of choice. This places the image of God in the power humans have to act on their own, in mastery and moral responsibility” (Pinckaers 137). Zosima and Alyosha gradually and rationally arrive at the maturity of prudence through their abiding faith in the “precious image of Christ.” Their faith is animated by what Dostoevsky’s contemporary St. John Henry Newman called “the illative sense.” “The term first appears in The Grammar of Assent where Newman describes the illative sense as an intellectual analogue to phronesis. The ‘illative sense’ . . . describes the day-to-day ability of the mind to gather together many small pieces of evidence into a grand conclusion that is not strictly warranted by logical criteria” (Kaplan and Coolman 624). Aidan Nichols describes the illative sense as “the heaping together of tiny indications, none of which by itself is conclusive, [but which] produces certitude in ordinary human affairs” (Kaplan and Coolman 624).67
These “tiny indications,” sown with “seeds from different worlds” (276), can be found in quotidian life. As Pieper observes, the saints are those who understand this most clearly: “We would . . . remind our readers how intensely the great saints loved the ordinary and commonplace, and how anxious they were lest they might have been deceived into regarding their own hidden craving for the ‘extraordinary’ as a ‘counsel’ of the Holy Spirit of God” (Cardinal 39). The ego-ridden ascetic Ferapont craves the extraordinary: his mushroom diet elicits hallucinatory distortions of reality. He condemns Zosima for enjoying cherry jam, and for prescribing a laxative when a brother monk sees devils. Saint Zosima provides a model of sensible, faithful prudence.
Prudence fosters hope in a transcendent telos, a pilgrim’s vision of slow, quotidian progress toward union with Love in heaven. In the West, we may call this communal beatitude or the beatific vision;68 in the East theosis or deification. Persons are called to sanctification in this life and “Godmanhood” in the next. “Man, according to St. Basil, is a creature who has received a commandment to become God. But this commandment is addressed to human freedom, and does not overrule it. As a personal being man can accept the will of God; he can also reject it” (Lossky 124). In The Brothers Karamazov, characters de-form themselves through laceration (nadryv) and assertion of autonomous “man-godhood.” Ivan’s youthful writing evokes Nietzsche’s valorization of the übermensch:69 “Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear” (546). The assertion of man-godhood—with its consequent denial of the personhood of others—proves infernal. But “paradise” remains the alternative, and not only in its ultimate form of theosis, but in the analogical joys experienced here and now: “life is a paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won’t see it, if we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day” (249). Here Zosima’s dying brother Markel articulates his experience of joy, as do Mikhail (268), Alyosha (311), Mitya (429), and Kolya and the boys (646). But their taste of the infinite is preceded by an incarnational descent into finitude.
Descent and Ascent
In Dostoevsky’s novel, paradisal joy emerges after a Christic passage into the suffering intrinsic to our free yet finite, creatural existence. The practice of active love is “harsh and dreadful” (55), and entails a Christic passage of descent and ascent. As William F. Lynch writes, “the great fact of Christology, that Christ moved down into all the realities of man to get to his Father” (Christ and Apollo 13). Lynch briefly traces this passage in Alyosha’s experience after Zosima’s death, but readers can discern its recurring pattern in the lives of each major character in the novel.
The descent/ascent pattern provides the form for two other great Christian narratives of conversion and confession: Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Commedia.70 In the Milan garden, Augustine tearfully falls to the ground and hears a child’s sing-song voice repeat