Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism. Paul J. Contino
incarnation] possessed a new and profound sublimity” (47).78 The sermo humilis style bears affinities to Dostoevsky’s Christian or incarnational realism, both in the narrator’s relationship to characters like Fyodor, and in its deep valuing of ordinary life’s capacity to point, analogically, to the divine.
The novel’s narrator “descends to all men in loving-kindness” (“Sermo” 65) by pointing to the possibility of the two conflicting responses—both histrionic, buffoonish exultation and authentic, childlike grief. He thus humbly acknowledges Fyodor’s possibilities and his own lack of omniscience. He descends from a position above Fyodor, to a position alongside. He slows down and gives Fyodor a more attentive look. The narrator’s negative capability allows him to resist an all-too-neat explanation of Fyodor’s apparently contradictory behavior, and reveals a respect for his ineluctable personhood. “But who knows[?]” the narrator muses earlier in the paragraph, commenting on conflicting explanations of Fyodor’s antics: the narrator—and Dostoevsky behind him—accepts a less-than-omniscient stance in relation to the characters in his story. In the chapter’s final sentence, he reminds us that we ought to go and do likewise. After all, we too can be inconsistent. Thus, in the very first chapter, the narrator-chronicler suggests that the book we are about to read will make a claim upon us: by entering into its characters’ lives, we will recognize some of our own follies. But we may also recover the child-like simple-heartedness that acknowledges our need for others, and that grieves when we lose them to death. “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 18:3).79
The narrator’s “loving descent” from a finalizing position above Fyodor, to an open position beside him is analogous to the kenosis or self-emptying of Christ. In their pioneering biography of Mikhail Bakhtin, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist first suggested this analogy. If Flaubert situates himself in a controlling distance above his characters, Dostoevsky, “in the best kenotic tradition, . . . gives up the privilege of a distinct and higher being to descend into his text, to be among his creatures. Dostoevsky’s distinctive image of Christ results in the central role of polyphony in his fiction” (249). Bakhtin’s concept of “polyphony”—Dostoevsky’s respect for the freedom of his characters, and his willingness to let them speak in their many, diverse voices—is thus integral to the aesthetic form of incarnational realism.80
Here form deeply reflects content: perhaps the key thematic affirmation of The Brothers Karamazov is that each created person is free and thus has a sacred dignity. Dostoevsky’s respect for his character’s freedom is analogous to divine respect for human freedom. Given the human person’s created reality as imago Dei, freedom is intrinsic to human identity. The Grand Inquisitor rejects the “anguish” often occasioned in human freedom, and he insists that Christ’s “gift” has overwhelmed the ordinary person: “Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter” (223). In response, Christ offers no defense. He simply, silently attends, and leaves the Inquisitor with a loving kiss. Christ evinces his respect for the Inquisitor’s personhood, who, after all, has insisted that Christ remain “silent” (217).81 Analogously, the active love exemplified by Zosima and Alyosha respects the freedom of those who seek their counsel. Dostoevsky’s polyphonic authorship respects the freedom and complexity of his characters.
Repetitions or recapitulations of this pattern—Christ’s kenotic descent and ascent—create what Robin Feuer Miller calls “a novel of rhymes”: “[T]he very rhyming or interconnectedness of the parts of The Brothers Karamazov becomes the reader’s own thread through [its] labyrinth of events and ideas. . . . Characters, fragments of plot, fragments of time—all echo and reverberate in unexpected ways and places” (Worlds 13).82 These rhymes lend the novel its formal beauty and recurring sense of mystery. In the next chapter I turn to Dostoevsky’s understanding of beauty, and the way its iconic manifestations call the novel’s characters to moral conversion and confession.
Chapter 2
Beauty and Re-formation
Early in the novel, Mitya confesses to Alyosha: “I always read [Schiller’s] poem about Ceres and man. Has it reformed me? Never! . . .” (96). But if we look at the scene more closely, we do see signs of Mitya’s reform. His confession—which next draws on Goethe—becomes a prayer, a bow to God: “Let me be vile and base, only let me kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is shrouded. Though I may be following the devil, I am Thy son, O Lord, and I love Thee, and I feel the joy without which the world cannot stand” (97). The beauty of poetry propels Mitya’s desire for metanoia, and a recognition of his continuing capacity for joy. Robert Louis Jackson puts it well: “Precisely in his keenly felt sense of ignominy, . . . in [Mitya’s] moral despair at what he discovers in himself and in man, lies the measure of the possibility for change” (Form 64). Mitya’s encounter with poetic beauty—and the ideal to which it points—elicits his sense of sin and still-inchoate resolve to change. “An apparent enthusiasm for the beautiful is mere idle talk when divorced from the sense of a divine summons to change one’s life” (Balthasar, “Revelation” 107). Mitya senses this summons. By the end of the novel he will give it moral and spiritual form as his “consciousness of a new man within himself is accompanied by an aesthetic awareness of himself as an ‘image and likeness of God’” (Jackson, Form 65).
Mitya faces many challenges, and one of them can be found here, in the way he bifurcates beauty into two “ideals”—one divine, one demonic. He desires the human person to be less “broad” in his capacities, but in achieving that aim, would remove flesh from spirit, and thus cripple his apprehension of beauty’s analogical potential. Specifically, he doesn’t yet recognize the sanctifying potential in his desire for Grushenka:
Beauty is a terrible and awful thing. . . . I can’t endure the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What is still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. (98)
Mitya rightly retains the ideal of Mary, the Madonna whose free consent made possible the incarnation. But his emphatic “either/or” severs the saintly receptivity modelled by Mary—“Let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38)—from human eros. He imagines an internal war in which spiritual beauty (represented by God) battles the beauty of fleshly form (represented by the devil): “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man” (98). For the gnostic or Manichaean, the battlefield presents armies equally matched. For the Christian realist, the Creator remains invulnerable to the wiles of demons, who are, after all, creatures. Out of love for creatures, the Creator enters bodily, created reality and thus hallows it. The person, made in the Creator’s image and likeness, can exercise freedom, and draw upon the Creator’s grace to do so fully. Christian realism is incarnational: body and soul are integrally related; desire can be well-directed or dis-ordered. Rightly, Mitya rejects the lust and violence captured in the image of “Sodom.” But his desire for Grushenka—who is very much on his mind in this discourse with Alyosha—can’t be reduced to “Sodom.” Sodom surfaces when Mitya reduces and reifies her personhood to her “supple curve” (107). Misapprehending her personal reality, Mitya allows himself to be consumed by lust and the disordered rage he imposes on his father Fyodor and others: Snegiryov, Ilyusha, Grigory. Even after he becomes a “new man” and has “taken all [of Grushenka’s) soul” into his own (501), he becomes jealous when she’s kind to other men (477).
Mitya remains human, a work-in-progress. But through his difficult descent into finitude—still in process at the novel’s close—he slowly learns to integrate eros and agape. Even in his marriage with Grushenka, he will find beauty’s most “mysterious and terrible” (98) form in the “precious” (276), kenotic image of Christ.83 His marriage will entail a cross of its own; he does not “run away from crucifixion” (502) in his commitment to the woman whom he passionately loves and will serve as a husband. “The humiliation of the servant only makes the concealed