Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism. Paul J. Contino
Purgatory. At its apex, he meets his confessor, Beatrice, before whom, weeping, he takes responsibility for his sin. Washed clean, he is prepared for his ascent into the beatific vision of paradise.
In Dante’s “poetics of conversion” “the need for another’s guidance and for a descent into humility” are crucial; “Augustine’s Confessions provides the model and supreme analogue” (Freccero xii). The Confessions enact both a confession of faith and confession of sin. Similarly, Dante the pilgrim’s confession before Beatrice bears fruit in Dante the poet’s concluding hymn of praise for “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” (Par. 33). Dante’s confession comprises the crux of his journey out of the dark wood. As von Balthasar observes, “The confession scene is not just an episode in the Comedy; it is the dynamic goal of the whole journey. And yet it is just as much the point of departure for Paradise” (Glory III, Lay Styles 61). The Brothers Karamazov presents a “prosaics of conversion” in which confession to Zosima or Alyosha prove crucial in character’s incarnational passage of descent and ascent. Christ’s incarnation is central to the imagination of all three writers. Like Augustine and Dante, Dostoevsky sees Christ as both human and divine, and as the incarnate model to which every human life is called to conform. Near the end of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor posits a potent imperative: “we have to struggle to recover a sense of what the Incarnation means” (754). Part of that project of recovery entails an awareness of those medieval sources in which Christ’s incarnation is understood as pivotal. Dostoevsky’s novel retrieves this “old Christian realism” (Auerbach, Mimesis 521).71
A pictorial analogue may be found in the quattrocento Italian art of Giotto, whose fresco series in Padua’s Arena Chapel renders key moments in the life of Christ in homely, embodied form. A few years earlier, he had done much the same in Assisi’s Basilica, depicting the Christ-like life of St. Francis, the “Pater Seraphicus,” whose title Ivan lends to Zosima (230).72
Influenced by Francis’s incarnational spirit, his love of the natural world, Giotto marks the decisive break from the Byzantine tradition of iconic representation practiced for centuries in Italy—gold-laden backgrounds, stylized, transfigured flesh—and an entry into the naturalism of the Renaissance.73
In Giotto’s imagination, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ transforms time and affirms the value of narrative as that which necessarily transpires over time. Discussing Giotto’s friend Dante, John Freccero elucidates a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians in which “Christ is described as ‘the fullness of time’” (267). All that precedes Christ’s incarnation can be understood as figural anticipation of that decisive joining of divine and human. All that proceeds from that event can be understood as its recapitulation.74 The human drama is one of conversion, confession, and virtuous effort, one of descent into humility, penitence and ascent into the practice of active love: the “theodrama” of descent and ascent recapitulates the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
So too does the drama of saints like Zosima and Alyosha (or Sonia, in Crime and Punishment) who serve as confessors for others. In their encounters, each descends and empties himself in kenotic attention to the other. Thus the scriptural figural patterns in the novel observed by many of the novel’s best commentators.75 As Harriet Murav notes, “the basic proposition of Dostoevsky’s novel [is] that human history can be touched by God, that we are not limited to the horizontal time frame. Our world and other worlds converge, to use the language of the novel” (134).
By locating his characters’ stories within the context of the biblical narrative, Dostoevsky follows the “traditional realistic interpretation of the biblical stories” (Frei 1). Hans Frei contrasts realistic reading with two others. The first, “mythological reading,” denies the concrete reality represented in narrative; the second, scientific/historical criticism, reduces Christ solely to his material, finite condition, and severs him from the spiritual, infinite realty also affirmed by the Gospel narratives. “[T]he traditional reading of Scripture” recognizes both spiritual reality and “referred to and described actual historical occurrences.” Scripture thus forms “one cumulative story,” and provides the warrant for interpreting “earlier biblical stories [as] figures or types of later stories and of their events and patterns of meaning.”76 The shape of The Brothers Karamazov, its characters and events, are likewise presented “as figures of [the scriptural] storied world.” Its characters gradually discern its figurative pattern woven into reality, even as the reader—especially upon rereading—hears recurring rhymes and chimes within the world of the novel. Throughout, “the sublime or at least serious effect mingles inextricably with the quality of what is casual, random, ordinary, and everyday” (Frei 14).
Frei draws upon the work of Erich Auerbach, who sees “three historical high points in [realistic narrative’s] development: the Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the nineteenth-century novel” (16), specifically the Russian novel, and especially Dostoevsky’s work:
It seems that the Russians were naturally endowed with the possibility of conceiving of everyday things in a serious vein; that a classicist aesthetics which excludes a literary category of “the low” from serious treatment could never gain a firm foothold in Russia. Then, too, as we think of Russian realism, remembering that it came into its own only during the nineteenth century and indeed only during the second half of it, we cannot escape the observation that it is . . . fundamentally related . . . to the old-Christian than to modern occidental realism. (Mimesis 521; emphasis added)
The Brothers Karamazov retrieves “old Christian realism” for our “secular age.” The novel’s perennial relevance provides one means of “recover[ing] a sense of what the incarnation might mean” (Taylor, Secular 754).
An illustration of this figural descent/ascent pattern can be found in the novel’s first chapter, and comprises my third (long-promised) textual example. The narrator, an ordinary townsperson of Skotoprigonevsk, recalls events that occurred there thirteen years earlier (in about 1867). He introduces Fyodor Pavlovich as “an ill-natured buffoon and nothing more” (3). His tone is insistent and dismissive. But in the final paragraph, as he describes the old man’s reaction to the death of his first wife, he relaxes his judgment:
Fyodor Pavlovich was drunk when he first heard of his wife’s death: they say that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace,” but according to others he wept without restraint like a little child, so much so that it was pitiful to look at him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions are true, that is, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him—both at the same time. In most cases, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too. (13)
By the end, the narrator releases his earlier “finalization” of Fyodor, and suggests, humbly, the limits of his omniscience:77 Fyodor may have both buffoonishly travestied Scripture and wept like the child Christ counselled all to become (Matt 18:3). Humbly, the narrator lets this mystery be.
The humility of this narrative style—which alternates with a more conventionally omniscient one—bears an affinity to patristic Christian realism: the sermo humilis or low style exemplified by St. Augustine, especially his sermons. As Erich Auerbach explains, the low style employs “humble everyday things” (“Sermo” 37) and language to signify the most sublime subjects—God, grace, redemption—and were authorized in doing so by the event of the incarnation. “Humilis is related to humus, the soil, and literally means low, low lying, of small stature” (“Sermo” 39). The word “humilis became the most important adjective characterizing [Christ’s] Incarnation” (40). For the patristic and later monastic literary imagination, “the humility of the Incarnation derives its full force from the contrast with Christ’s divine nature: man and God, lowly and sublime, humilis et sublimis; both the height and the depth are immeasurable and inconceivable . . .” (43). Such a paradoxical combination of sublime subject matter and humble style baffled its contemporary audience: “Most educated pagans regarded the early Christian writings as ludicrous, confused, and abhorrent . . .” (45). But to the Christian believer, Christ’s refusal to clutch and hold on to