Authors: Joseph Frank
Because sin is omnipresent, a good deal of effort is required to achieve the state of mind that he recommends. As a remedy, “there is only one means of salvation”: “Take yourself and make yourself responsible for everything and 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.” To take on oneself the burden of universal guilt thus becomes the only antidote to despair at the existence of evil. Only by taking responsibility for
all
sin could they avoid “sharing the pride of Satan and murmuring against God” (as Ivan had done). Even a judge appointed by law should “act in the same spirit so far as possible, for [the criminal] will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done” (14: 290–291). Such would be the ideal situation, already mentioned by Zosima in discussing Ivan’s article, when the state would be transformed into a church and the punishment of a criminal would be exclusively the work of his own moral conscience. If the criminal should go away unredeemed, however, “mocking at you,” his self-chastisement will eventually occur. Nothing that happens can thus infirm such a faith.
Faith does not require confirmation by miracles, nor should failure in combating evil lead to discouragement. Zosima urges his listeners to subdue any “desire for vengeance on the evildoers” by seeking suffering and blaming only themselves. “If you had been a light, you would have lighted the path for others too. . . . And even though your light was shining, yet you see men were not saved by it, hold firm and doubt not the power of the heavenly light. . . . Men are always saved after the death of the deliverer” (14: 292). This later redemption is what occurred in the case of Christ, and we will see it repeated after Zosima’s death as well.
Dostoevsky well knew that these injunctions are difficult for human reason to understand, and as a last resort Zosima falls back on the mystery of human life itself. Much is concealed in the earthly life of humankind, and “many of the strongest feelings and movements of our nature we cannot comprehend. . . . 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.” Dostoevsky then sets down Zosima’s often-quoted words of the link between earthly life and other worlds: “God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on the earth, . . . but what grows . . . is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds.” Once “such contact is lost, then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it.” Zosima returns to the Franciscan note of cosmic mysticism in affirming the beauty and goodness of all God’s creation: “Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it.
Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love. Love all men, love everything. . . . Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears” (14: 290–292).
After such an ecstatic summation, Zosima shifts back to the problem of the human condition. Hell contains no scenario of hooks and grappling irons, à la Feodor. Rather, according to Zosima, hell is this eternal torment, “the suffering of no longer being able to love.” So far as “hellfire in the material sense” is concerned, he declares that “I don’t go into that mystery and I shun it” (14: 293). Hell is purely a spiritual torment, not to be depicted,
pace
Dante and Milton, in physical imagery at all. Dostoevsky thus remains faithful to his poetics of subjectivity by transforming even hell into an attribute of the human psyche. Milton had preceded him when Satan declares in
Paradise Lost
, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,”
4
but this is not accompanied in Milton by a rejection of the traditional imagery.
5
So ends Alyosha’s rendition of Zosima’s
zhitie
, and the thread of the story is then taken up again by the narrator. We return to the cell where Zosima was speaking to his intimates, “so cheerful and talkative” that he seemed to have undergone a temporary recovery, but he dies on this very day, his peacefully solemn demise fully in accord with the sanctity of his life since becoming a priest, and with the teachings that Alyosha had recorded.
1
Vaclav Cerny,
Essai sur le titanisme dans la poésie romantique occidentale entre 1815 et 1850
(Prague, 1935).
2
Roger L. Cox,
Between Earth and Heaven
(New York, 1969), 194.
3
No part of the Legend has been more influential and important than this prediction of what is the world of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Dostoevsky’s nightmare vision of the surrender of inner freedom for untroubled security was also a predecessor of the literary genre of Dystopia, represented by such works as Evgeny Zamiatin’s
We
, Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
, and George Orwell’s
1984
.
4
John Milton,
Paradise Lost
, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1933), 235.
5
Dostoevsky’s depiction of the monastic milieu and the
zhitie
of Zosima was subjected to severe censure by Konstantin Leontiyev, who also reported that it had displeased the community of Optyna Pustin. He found that “
a genuine mystical
sentiment was . . . expressed rather weakly, but the sentiment of
humanitarian idealization
even in the speeches of the monks was expressed very ardently and at length” (
PSS
, 15: 497). Indeed, in the assertion made by Markel that it is entirely within man’s will to make paradise come true, nothing is said about any cooperation of man with God in effectuating such a transformation, and it thus appears to be an entirely secular event, only requiring, as the Utopian Socialists had once preached, the unconditional application of the Christian law of love to earthly life. Nor does the cosmic mysticism indigenous to Eastern Orthodoxy, as Zosima expresses it, require any supernatural grace to be experienced.
Ivan’s Legend and Zosima’s
zhitie
have established the polarities of the conflict between reason and faith, and each of the main characters will be confronted by a crisis that requires choosing between them. Faith of some kind will prevail in all of these climactic moments—not necessarily faith in a specifically moral-religious form, as will occur with Alyosha, but a faith that incarnates some aspect of the morality of love and the self-transcendence of egoism represented and preached by Zosima. Alyosha is the first of the three brothers whose life experiences have been foreshadowed by those of Zosima, and there is a structural parallel between the unrolling of the crisis situations and the order of the linkage of the brothers with Zosima’s life. It is thus with Alyosha that the first conflict between reason and faith is posed and resolved.
Alyosha’s disaccord occurs on the moral-religious level and arises as a result of Zosima’s death and the accompanying expectation throughout the monastic community and the town that God would provide some external reward for the sanctity of his life. The monks were filled with excitement and expectation to such a degree that the learned Father Paissy, versed in Church doctrine and history, considered it “unseemly” and “an evil temptation.” And so it was: a version of the second temptation of Christ, who had refused to demonstrate his immunity to the laws of nature by leaping unharmed from the pinnacle of the temple. Yet even Paissy “secretly, at the bottom of his heart, cherished almost the same hopes and could not but be aware of it” (14: 296).
At the very least, the sanctity of Zosima’s life might have guaranteed a respite from the normal laws of earthly decay; and so the unexpected “odor of corruption” emitted by the corpse was immediately seized on by those unfriendly to him as a sign of heavenly disapproval, unleashing a malevolent chorus of criticism. “I feel it almost repulsive to recall that event,” says the narrator, and he would not have done so “if it had not exerted a very strong influence on the heart and soul of the chief, though
future
, hero of my story” (14: 297). Ivan’s powerful attack on God for having created a world of suffering and injustice had continued to undermine Alyosha’s faith; and the death of Zosima, coupled with this seeming disgrace, had dealt a staggering blow to the tranquil stability of Alyosha’s convictions. But his faith will reemerge strengthened from the trial
and this reaffirmation is already foreshadowed by his encounters with Grushenka, who is struggling between feelings of resentment and rage against the Polish officer who had seduced and abandoned her and the desire to forgive.
The narrator insists that “it was not miracles [Alyosha] needed but only ‘the higher justice’ which had been in his belief outraged by the blow that had so suddenly and so cruelly wounded his heart.” Because such “higher justice” presumably would have meant displaying a certain immunity to “the pitiless laws of nature,” all the narrator’s apologetic efforts cannot conceal that, even if inspired by the greatness of his love, Alyosha has yielded like the others to the second temptation of the devil. And at this moment, quite appropriately, Alyosha also recalls the “vague but tormenting impression left by his conversation with Ivan the day before,” who had also found intolerable this lack of any “higher justice” in a creation that allowed the suffering of innocent children (14: 306–307).
Most likely this is why, for the first and only time, the narrator allows himself to criticize the character he had taken under his wing: “All the love that lay concealed in his pure heart for ‘everyone and everything’ had, for the past year, been concentrated—and perhaps wrongly so—primarily . . . on his beloved elder, now dead” (14: 306). As a result, the shock of the event led him to neglect his obligations to “everyone and everything”—for example, to his brother Dimitry, whom he had been told to watch over, and to the utterly destitute Snegiryov family, for whom he had been entrusted with two hundred rubles by Katerina. Alyosha’s situation is similar to that of Ivan, whose “rebellion” allowed him to stifle any resistance to a possible murder. The parallel is clearly drawn in his conversation with the cynical and disabused Rakitin. Observing Alyosha’s disillusionment, the latter scoffs at his dismay “because your old man had begun to stink,” amusedly accusing him of “being in a temper with your God, you are rebelling against him.” Alyosha’s reply—“I am not rebelling against my God; I simply ‘don’t accept his world’ ”—quotes Ivan’s very words (14: 308).
A characteristic of Dostoevsky’s mature technique is to refract a thematic motif through a succession of characters, each of whom expresses a different aspect of its meaning. The totally unprincipled Rakitin is thus another version of Ivan, completely lacking those moral-religious yearnings that Zosima had instantly detected in the young, controversial publicist. The narrator exhibits no mercy whatever toward Rakitin, who is now shown tempting the weakened Alyosha on another level by leading the innocent to Grushenka, who wished to obtain revenge by seducing the religious novice, her presumed despiser. But hearing of Zosima’s death, everything is transformed, and memories of her unsullied childhood resurface as she retells the folktale of the onion, heard long ago from a peasant woman.
This tale embodies that condemnation of a totally self-centered egoism that, according to Dostoevsky, was typical of the morality of the Russian folk character,
and it is narrated by Grushenka in a style imitative of folk poetry. A wicked old woman, submerged in the fiery lake of hell, had once given an onion to a beggarwoman, and her guardian angel endeavors to save her because of this one good deed. The angel lowers an onion to pull her up, but when other sinners cling to her as she rises, she cries back at them, “It’s my onion, not yours.” At this expression of selfishness the stem snaps, she falls back into hell, and the angel sadly departs (14: 319).
This childhood recollection provokes an even stronger crisis of conscience in Grushenka, and Alyosha is so moved by her confession and repentance, as well as the strength of her desire to forgive her Polish betrayer, that he tells Rakitin, “She is more loving than we” (14: 321). When the disgruntled cynic asks what Alyosha has said that stirs Grushenka so profoundly, she falls on her knees before the “cherub” and answers, “I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like you. I knew that someone like you would come and forgive me . . . would really love me, not only with a shameful love” (14: 323). The scene recalls the first meeting between Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna in
The Idiot
, when the Prince recognizes the purity of her spirit despite her past degradation.
Just as in
The Idiot
, where Nastasya asks Myshkin to decide whether she should marry, Grushenka asks Alyosha to make the fateful decision whether she should now forgive her seducer. Alyosha replies, “You have forgiven him already.” Having hoped to debauch Alyosha, Rakitin spitefully refers instead to his intended victim as having “turned the Magdalene onto the true path.” The sarcasm of his embittered words nonetheless reluctantly recognizes the truth: “So you see that the miracles you were looking for just now have come to pass” (14: 322). Genuine miracles occur when faith succeeds in aiding the morality of love to conquer egoistic resentment, hatred, and revenge.
Alyosha’s encounter with Grushenka restores him to himself and reveals the depths of unselfish love hidden in the human conscience. Men and women are not as weak and selfish as Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor had claimed; they are capable of putting into practice the morality of love stemming from a faith in Christ. The meeting thus serves as a transition to the resolution of Alyosha’s crisis, which begins when he reenters the cell where Paissy, holding a vigil beside Zosima’s corpse, is reading aloud from the Gospel of Saint John. His state of mind had entirely changed, and “the odor of corruption . . . no longer made him feel miserable and indignant.” Instead, “there was a sweetness in his heart . . . and joy, joy was glowing in his mind and in his heart” (14: 325).