Negative Christology in Demons and Brothers Karamazov
A complete atheist stands on the next-to-last step to the most complete faith.
Demons, “At Tikhon’s”
DOSTOEVSKY’S SYMBOL OF FAITH
Paradox is at the center of Dostoevsky’s engagement not only with Christ but also with matters of faith throughout his career. In his famous March 1854 letter to the Decembrist wife Natal’ia Fonvizina he declares, “I am a child of this century, a child of doubt and disbelief, I have been and shall ever be (that I know), until they close the lid of my coffin.” At the same time, he nevertheless singles out a potent “symbol of faith” in his life “in which all is clear and sacred.” He writes: “This symbol is very simple and here is what it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous, and more perfect than Christ; and there not only isn’t, but I tell myself with a jealous love, there cannot be. More than that—if someone succeeded in proving to me that Christ was outside the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, I would sooner remain with Christ than with the truth.”1
All of the writer’s future artistic method is on full display here: the writer’s love of hyperbole and contradiction, his use of assertion through negation, his allowing of unexpected outcomes, and perhaps most of all, his reluctance to make a straightforward, earnest declaration of faith. After all, a declaration of faith in a Christ “outside the truth” is hardly an affirmation of the Christian profession of Dostoevsky’s native Orthodoxy, for if Christ is not the truth, then what becomes of Orthodoxy? Is Dostoevsky’s credo, then, perhaps even a tacit admission of a possible atheism on the writer’s part? Or is he instead using unbelief as a paradoxical way of affirming belief, by making a negative formulation serve a positive end? Or, finally, is Dostoevsky’s symbol of faith ultimately meant to present an unresolvable contradiction, allowing for both possibilities at once, faith and unbelief, like the metaphysical gambits of the writer’s later works, where readers can find as many reasons not to believe as to believe. “What a terrible torment this thirst to believe has cost me and is still costing me,” Dostoevsky writes in his letter, “and the stronger it becomes in my soul, the stronger are the arguments against it.”2
If doubt is faith’s constant companion, then for Dostoevsky it is also a kind of dangerous but necessary goad. Indeed, unbelief is so strongly and convincingly articulated in his works precisely because it is also capable of revealing faith both dramatically and compellingly. Readers often learn the most about faith in Dostoevsky’s works apophatically, that is, by discovering what it is not. Dostoevsky’s letter to Fonvizina alerts us to such possible paradoxes when the writer speaks about belief. The letter is thus important not only because it speaks to the writer’s state of mind about faith, but also because it anticipates his future methodology, for it is one of his first written provocations in which he probes given truths and seeks affirmation in seeming refutation. But does all apparent refutation of belief by Dostoevsky serve as a covert affirmation of faith? Or, like his statement about Christ “outside the truth,” does the apophatic impulse in his novels lead as easily to unbelief as to belief? Why does unbelief loom larger than belief in so many of Dostoevsky’s works? These questions are at the heart of two of the writer’s most important Christological novels: Demons—in which Dostoevsky actually quotes the paradoxical credo from his 1854 letter—and The Brothers Karamazov, in which the writer’s apophatic approach is more pronounced than in any other novel.
MAN-GOD VERSUS GOD-MAN: CHRIST “OUTSIDE THE TRUTH” IN DEMONS
Though intended as a “pamphlet novel” in which he vowed to lay bare all of his opinions “fervently” and “to the last word” about the political issues of his day,3 Demons is as much about Dostoevsky’s metaphysical preoccupations as it is about his political concerns. Indeed, the two are connected. In an 1873 article responding to critics of Demons, Dostoevsky links his own involvement in a radical political society—the Petrashevsky Circle—to questions of belief in God. He first makes clear that, while Demons was based on the story of the revolutionary and conspirator Sergei Nechaev4—whose ruthless murder of one of his collaborators, I. I. Ivanov, and eventual arrest in 1869 received sensational coverage in the Russian press—his intention in his novel was not the “literal reproduction of the Nechaev story” but an attempt to explain how such a phenomenon “could arise in our society.”5 Dismissing the notion floated in the press that only the “idle and underdeveloped” could be so radicalized, Dostoevsky uses his own life story to suggest that the opposite is more likely; that “diligent, ardent young people who were in fact studying and who possessed good hearts” are the very ones most likely to turn into “Nechaevs” and “Nechaevists” (279, 283). Indeed, Dostoevsky declares that this is what happened to him. “I myself am an old ‘Nechaevist,’” he pronounces in his article. “I also stood on the scaffold condemned to death, and I assure you that I stood in the company of educated people” (284).
Dostoevsky’s point is that if the “utopian socialism” à la Charles Fourier of his youth could have given birth to the radical materialists of the present day, then any ideal is susceptible to sudden and extreme change—a theme worked out explicitly in Demons. As if to emphasize this point, Dostoevsky reveals that he himself came from “a family that was Russian and pious” who “knew the Gospels virtually from our earliest childhood” (289). While he blames “all these [John Stuart] Mills and [Charles] Darwins and [David Friedrich] Strausses” for leading today’s educated youth astray with their marked secularism (287) and rails about the “amazing lengths” the human mind can go “having rejected Christ” (288), the fact remains that Dostoevsky was nevertheless living proof of the possibility that someone piously raised on the Gospels could still become “an old Nechaevist.” He is thus confirming a cardinal truth of his own works: that the most ardent faith may turn, suddenly and dramatically, into the most passionate atheism.
In the censored chapter from Demons, Dostoevsky actually articulates this relationship, although the other way around. The Orthodox bishop Tikhon tells Nikolai Stavrogin, “A complete atheist stands on the next-to-last step to the most complete faith,” thus advocating the quasi-apophatic view that the more convinced people are of the impossibility of the divine, the more complete is the negative place from which they may grope their way back to God. They “may or may not take that step,” Tikhon acknowledges, but complete faith is nevertheless within their grasp.6 At first glance, this seems to be the case in Demons. While Dostoevsky’s political conspirators plot against God as much as against Russian autocracy, they also cannot quite do without God, as seen in the beliefs of Stavrogin, Aleksei Kirillov, and Ivan Shatov. In practice, however, belief only seems to beget unbelief in the novel, thus inverting the apophatic impulse articulated by Tikhon and reducing God to a shadowy presence glimpsed only at the edges of the novel’s metaphysical discourse.
A patchwork quilt of genres—now political satire, now gothic grotesque, now metaphysical drama—Demons is a novel that relies on mystification, inversions, doublings, and misdirection, in its plot and in its Christology. Stavrogin, who Dostoevsky claimed was the center of the novel and its “real hero,”7 is also central to its metaphysical inquiry. Christological associations attach to him and his two “disciples,” Kirillov and Shatov. The Greek word for “cross”—stavros—is inscribed in his name and, in a textual variant of the unpublished chapter “At Tikhon’s,” the narrator describes Stavrogin’s confession as expressing “the need for the cross in a man who does not believe in the cross.”8 He is an object of fascination, worshipful adoration, and ultimate revulsion. Kirillov and Shatov are his one-time ardent admirers and exist almost exclusively as the embodiments of his cast-off ideologies. Pyotr Verkhovensky, too, is in awe of him and seeks to make him the center of his revolution: “You are a leader, you are a sun, and I am your worm,” he exclaims, rapturously (2:8:419).
Verkhovensky’s interest in Stavrogin, however, is ultimately self-serving: Stavrogin is to be his “Ivan the Tsarevich,” his imposter, who will help him bring about his anarchic plans. The relationship between Stavrogin and Kirillov and Shatov is much deeper and more complicated. Stavrogin is, for them, a kind of god who has brought them into being. Shatov declares as much about Kirillov: “He’s your creation,” he tells Stavrogin (2:1:6:248). For his part, Shatov harbors a kind of religious faith in him, exclaiming: “Stavrogin, why am I condemned to believe in you unto ages of ages?” (2:1:6:255). Both men are tied to Stavrogin by their convictions and their very identities. Richard Peace calls them “the two halves of his divided self.”9 Indeed, when Stavrogin visits them in the long “Night” chapter, it is as if he is visiting two sides of his former self. They are doubles of him and inverse doubles of each other. But these doublings and inversions are themselves diabolical in nature: they all turn back upon themselves. Their chief feature is nullity, and in this way they help describe the void at the center of the novel: Stavrogin himself.
“Night” is one of the pivotal chapters for the novel’s Christology, where Stavrogin pays a visit to each of his protégés in succession, something that is not hard to do as they live in adjacent quarters. The ostensible reason for Stavrogin’s visit to Kirillov is to ask him to act as his second at his duel with Artemy Pavlovich Gaganov, which is itself a hint at their twin natures. The conversation quickly takes a philosophical turn, as Stavrogin inquires whether Kirillov is still intent on taking his own life—a plan that is part of Kirillov’s metaphysical game of “chicken” that he is playing with the idea of God. He desires, as he later explains to Pyotr Verkhovensky, to “proclaim self-will to the fullest point” as a way of proving the non-existence of God: “If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will” (3:6:2:617). Kirillov’s suicide would demonstrate that there is nothing greater than human volition, freeing humankind from the need to believe in God.
Kirillov’s act takes on a quasi-messianic character.10 “I will begin, and end, and open the door. And save,” he tells Verkhovensky (3:6:2:619), sounding like the Christ of Revelation.11 Stavrogin picks up on this in his conversation with him. When Kirillov proclaims that all people are good despite their committing the vilest of crimes, Stavrogin mutters, “He who taught that was crucified.” Kirillov, however, does not attribute this idea to Jesus Christ, the God-man (bogochelovek), who, in any case, never made such a statement.12 As Stavrogin finds out, he is referring to Christ’s opposite, the “Man-God” (chelovekobog) (2:1:5:238), the human being now raised higher than God, which Kirillov believes he will become through his act of supreme self-will—the outcome, Dostoevsky seems to be warning, of the secular humanists’ desire to exclude God from the definition of human personhood. “If there is no God, then I am God,” Kirillov tells Verkhovensky (3:6:2:617).
But Kirillov is full of contradictions, as Stavrogin discovers. He believes in eternal life, but not in an eternal power. He plays with children and loves life, but is intent on suicide. He lights his landlady’s icon lamps and prays “to everything,” but swears he is an atheist. Stavrogin is unconvinced, suspecting Kirillov of an unacknowledged theism: “If you found out that you believe in God, you would believe; but since you don’t know yet that you believe in God, you don’t believe” (2:1:5:239). Indeed, he predicts that Kirillov will be a believer the next time he sees him, while Pyotr Verkhovensky accuses him of believing “even more than any priest” (3:6:2:618).
They are right to be skeptical. If Kirillov deploys affirmations in the service of negation (his declarations that he loves life and that everything is good are, paradoxically, part of his justification for suicide), Kirillov’s negations can also conceal an affirmation. In his conversation with Verkhovensky, for instance, he cites the story of Christ’s crucifixion as confirmation of the deceitful nature of belief in God. “If the laws of nature did not pity even This One, did not pity even their own miracle, but made Him, too, live amidst a lie and die for a lie,” he argues, “then the whole planet is a lie, and stands upon a lie and a stupid mockery.” And yet, the language he uses to describe Jesus—a “miracle,” “the highest on all the earth,” who “constituted what it was to live for,” without whom “the whole planet with everything on it is—madness only” (3:6:2:618)—is also strong affirmation of the exalted nature of Christ. Kirillov’s argument for unbelief thus also gives us reason to believe. It has a whiff of apophaticism to it. But it is also characteristic of the novel’s device of doublings and inversions. Outwardly, Kirillov extols humanity over God. Inwardly, he may secretly believe in God. He thus embodies an impossible contradiction.
Shatov suffers from a similar incongruity: he believes in Christ but not in God. Actually, he is obsessed with the idea of the Russian Christ. And he is upset that Stavrogin, from whom he first learned of the messianic qualities of the Russian people, no longer believes in Christ. “But wasn’t it you,” he asks Stavrogin, “who told me that if someone proved to you mathematically that the truth is outside Christ, you would better agree to stay with Christ than with the truth? Did you say that? Did you?” (2:1:7:249). Stavrogin does not reply. Shatov, who seems to have succumbed to Stavrogin’s temptation that Christ and the truth—presumably, the Godhead—can be separate things, desperately needs Stavrogin to confirm that such a faith is possible. Here, the lines from Dostoevsky’s letter take on quite a different tone. Whereas Dostoevsky’s Christological formulation in his letter is ostensibly used in the service of a desire to believe, Shatov’s question to Stavrogin points in the opposite direction, toward unbelief. But he is terribly conflicted in his convictions. In this, he resembles Stavrogin, about whom Kirillov says: “If Stavrogin believes, then he does not believe that he does believe; but if he doesn’t believe, then he doesn’t believe that he doesn’t believe” (3:6:2:616).
Kirillov’s characterization of Stavrogin also sums up the book’s metaphysical indeterminacy. Belief shades into unbelief and unbelief into belief, but no one seems able to commit to either belief or unbelief entirely. The metaphysical landscape is as unstable as the political one. Indeed, Kirillov and Shatov seem to espouse philosophical views that actually subvert themselves. Kirillov’s atheism seems to allow for the possibility of belief in God, while Shatov’s belief in a messianic Christ is built on an atheistic foundation.13 Contradiction, it turns out, is the reigning spirit of the novel. There is no better example of this phenomenon in Demons than Shigalyov’s speech. A member of Pyotr Verkhovensky’s group and the novel’s chief theoretician of socialism, Shigalyov shares his vision of the “social organization of the future society” only to discover that his idea leads him to the exact opposite position from which he started. “I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start,” he declares. “Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism” (2:7:2:402).
Stavrogin, too, epitomizes contradiction, the perfect state for a man who appears to stand for nothing at all. Indeed, contrariness is central to his concept of self, as his erratic behavior confirms.14 It is a product of the negation that he claims “pours out” of himself. But even that negation is “shallow and listless,” he confesses (3:8:676), amounting to nothing more than a kind of lukewarm indifference. He thus fits the description of the passage from Revelation 3:15–16, which Sofya Matveevna opens at random and reads to Stepan Verkhovensky at the end of the novel: “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot! Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth” (3:7:2:653).
The passage from Revelation confirms the importance of the vital polarities in Dostoevsky’s own examination of belief: absolute doubt and absolute faith. Either is preferable to a tepid conviction that hedges, for each in their extreme certitude conceals a revelatory potential (the possibility that atheism might illuminate faith or faith, atheism) and potential reversal (from belief to doubt or unbelief to faith). Stavrogin professes no such strong conviction. Our hero whose name is inscribed with the cross thus turns out to be a rather poor guide for our via negativa toward Christ, despite what Rowan Williams calls all of his “messianic resonances.”15 Unlike his two disciples, he professes nothing at all. He thus represents not so much a negation of Christ as supreme indifference to him. He neither “believes in the cross” nor articulates any alternative to it. He is merely lukewarm.16
The most distinct Christology that emerges from the novel’s doublings and inversions, it turns out, is the parodic one played out in Kirillov’s suicide,17 a death, like Christ’s, that is meant to “save” humanity. But Kirillov’s suicide will “save” humanity by proving the non-existence of God and, concomitantly, the non-divine nature of Christ, thus setting mankind free not from the shackles of sin and death but from the throes of superstition. It is thus a mockery of Christ’s crucifixion, a fitting outcome for a novel that seems to affirm only a Christ who is “outside the truth.” Inversion and negation are the ruling spirits of the novel’s metaphysics—the absent Godhead is more strongly articulated in this novel than anywhere else in Dostoevsky’s work. Whether this aspect of the novel produces an apophatic darkness from which to glimpse the transcendence of God, however, is debatable. Are Dostoevsky’s characters on the next-to-last step to the most complete faith, as Tikhon puts it, by novel’s end, or are they drowning in a sea of unbelief? By all indications, the latter outcome seems to be the case. Kirillov’s parodic inversion is not so much a kind of apophaticism as it is a negation in the service of unbelief (there is no God, I am the Man-God). Similarly, Shatov’s faith in a Christ “outside the truth” is not so much inversion as it is perversion: it does not bring us closer to a union with the Godhead but rather distances us from it (I believe in Christ, but I do not yet believe in God).
One thing is certain: the gloom—more darkness than apophatic ignorance—is thick in this “darkest of Dostoevsky’s novels,”18 with its five murders, two suicides, and two untimely deaths. Even Stepan Verkhovensky’s deathbed conversion at novel’s end does little to lift the mood or enlighten the novel’s spiritual quandaries, for it is unclear whether he is actually declaring unequivocal belief in God or merely articulating his “Great Thought” that human beings must always be able to bow down before the “immeasurably great” (3:7:3:664). Typical of the novel’s refusal to grant clarity in spiritual matters, it is never made clear whether Stepan’s “Great Thought” is meant to be equated with God. The narrator himself is skeptical about Stepan’s conversion, wondering whether he “had really come to believe” or whether “the majestic ceremony” of taking the Holy Sacrament on his death bed had simply “shaken him and aroused the artistic receptivity of his nature” (3:7:3:662). Stepan, after all, is one of Dostoevsky’s great unreliable speakers, as he himself admits, summing up the novel’s philosophy of contradiction: “My friend, I’ve been lying all my life. Even when I was telling the truth” (3:7:2:652).
THE ABSENT CHRIST
If Demons fails to provide a Christ narrative that may redeem its protagonists, it does remind us of one paradoxical aspect of Dostoevsky’s Jesus: it is his absence that most intrigues us about the writer’s image of Christ. Nabokov may have complained about the number of characters “sinning their way to Jesus” in Dostoevsky’s novels,19 but in truth, Christ is an elusive figure in the writer’s works. He is all but absent from Dostoevsky’s fiction before 1860, when Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–1861) was published with its marvelous descriptions of the convicts’ celebration of Christmas and Easter. There, the image of Christ fleetingly asserts itself in the midst of the monstrous brutality of penal servitude. But even in those post-1860s works where the idea of Christ is central, it is Christ’s absence that is most striking. This is one reason why one may find unbelief to be as strongly or even more strongly expressed in Dostoevsky’s works than belief, for Dostoevsky’s Christ is often articulated as an absence.
Notes from Underground (1864) is one striking example. Written in response to the scientific materialism of his day, which reduced human beings to biological entities bereft of a spiritual nature and ruled entirely by environment, Notes was supposed to make a case for the necessity of Christ. It was to do so by showing the failure of both the underground and the Crystal Palace as socio-philosophical destinations of mankind. The Underground Man’s attempts to undermine the rationalist foundations on which radical materialism rests by asserting an extreme irrationalism were meant to be as ridiculous as they seem when readers first encounter them. The idea was to move from the Underground Man’s hell of arbitrary whim, spite, and self-lacerating solipsism to a higher notion of irrationalism embodied by Christ’s sacrificial love—the subject of the novel’s tenth chapter. The escape route proposed by Dostoevsky from both the dead end of the underground and the fraud of enlightened egoism was to be faith. But the censors got in the way. “It really would have been better not to print the next-to-last chapter at all (the most important chapter, in which the main idea is expressed), than to publish it as it is, i.e., with sentences chopped out, which distorts the meaning. But what can be done!” he complained to his brother. “The censors are a bunch of pigs—those places where I mocked everything and occasionally employed blasphemy for the sake of form they allowed to stand; but when, from all that, I deduced the need for faith and Christ, they took it out.”20
Instead, chapter 10 is the shortest in the novel. But it does raise the issue of a better alternative to both the underground and the Crystal Palace: “Show me something better and I’ll follow you,” the Underground Man declares. “Can it be that I was made this way only in order to reach the conclusion that my entire way of being is merely a fraud? Can this be the whole purpose? I don’t believe it.”21 Curiously, however, Dostoevsky never attempted to restore his novel’s tenth chapter. Either he did not relish asking the censors to reverse their ruling or he was not that interested in restoring a work that failed to make a splash when it appeared.22 Or perhaps he realized that the space where Christ was meant to be was still there, that his absence was as potent as his presence, perhaps even more so.
When the prostitute Liza throws her arms around the Underground Man in a spontaneous act of selfless compassion after being insulted and abused by him for having come to visit, she commits an act that makes her what in theological parlance is called a “type” of Christ. She is not Christ but in her actions affirms and illuminates him, perhaps doing so more effectively than any speech the Underground Man may have made in chapter 10 of part 1. Dostoevsky himself may well have sensed this, hence his disinclination to restore the censored chapter. Liza had, in a sense, already articulated “the need for faith and Christ.”23 What is left unsaid about the Godhead may serve better to illuminate him than what is articulated.24 If Christ is silent, absent, parodied, or otherwise distorted in the writer’s mature works, it is because Dostoevsky may well have understood the danger of trying to articulate Christ’s meaning in words. Say too much or the wrong thing and you may diminish that which you seek to elevate. Much of what drives the narrative of The Idiot seems to stem from this apprehension. By contrast, an apophatic approach can be a powerful tool by which to define the indefinable.
Olga Meerson, Carol Apollonio, Tatyana Kasatkina, and Malcolm Jones over the last twenty years have recognized the importance and applicability of apophatic theology in the writer’s works. There are two reasons for this development. First is the realization that all of those characters in Dostoevsky’s works who live in the liminal state between belief and nothingness are, intentionally or not, striking textual embodiments of the spiritual state of apophatic seekers of God. Second is a growing appreciation for how much Dostoevsky’s contact with Russian monasteries influenced him, where among other things he observed the prominence of hesychasm in the Russian Church—the attempt to know God through prayer “that is stripped, so far as possible, of all images, words and discursive thinking.”25 Here, the apophatic strain in Orthodox prayer is strongly pronounced and easily observable.
Paradox is key in Dostoevsky’s literary apophaticism, where states of unbelief may become markers of apophatic darkness leading to belief, where negation may work to affirm on some level, and where untruths can be deployed in the search for the truth. As Dmitrii Prokofych Razumikhin in Crime and Punishment explains: “I like it when people lie! [. . .] If you lie—you get to the truth! Lying is what makes a man. Not one truth has ever been reached without first lying fourteen times or so, maybe a hundred and fourteen, and that’s honorable in its way” (3:1:202).26 While lying does not constitute an apophatic exercise, Razumikhin nevertheless summarizes here an apophatic principle: truth, like God, is best revealed along a negative path. He also, of course, summarizes the whole movement of the novel: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov must also lie his way to the truth.
In no work is Dostoevsky’s apophatic approach more apparent than The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880). In this novel as in no other Dostoevsky explores how negative assertions about the Godhead constitute a kind of seeking after belief, whether it actually leads to belief or not. While in Demons Dostoevsky shows how unbelief only begets more of the same, in Brothers Karamazov he tests the extent to which a discourse of unbelief can actually illuminate a way to faith. In the analysis that follows, three arguments are made. The first is that, contrary to popular consensus, The Brothers Karamazov, like Demons but for different purposes, is primarily a book about unbelief rather than belief. The second is that it is Ivan Karamazov, not Alyosha, who is the novel’s important seeker after faith. And the third is that Ivan seeks God precisely along a negative path, that is, from the position of an atheist. His journey, and the main movement of the novel, thus describes a via negativa or apophatic quest.
IVAN KARAMAZOV AS APOPHATIC QUESTER
D. H. Lawrence famously called Ivan Karamazov “the greatest of the three brothers, pivotal,” for whom the “passionate Dmitri and the inspired Alyosha” are “only offsets.”27 Though he had previously declared his atheism when asked by his father, Ivan is, in fact, desperately in search of God. But Ivan can only search for God from a position of doubt and skepticism. Indeed, when they meet in a tavern to get acquainted, Ivan asks Alyosha where they should begin their discussion. Alyosha advises: “Begin with whatever you like, even ‘from the other end.’ You did proclaim yesterday at father’s that there is no God” (5:3:234).28 Alyosha’s urging to begin “from the other end,” that is, from an atheistic perspective, nicely anticipates the negative path that Ivan will traverse in his poem about the Grand Inquisitor, which is an apophatic text par excellence.
But can Ivan truly be understood as an apophatic quester after God? In one crucial aspect, he can. First and foremost, he bases his rebellion against God on the premise that the human mind can never comprehend God—the starting point for all apophatic inquiries. The Godhead by definition cannot be comprehended; hence the need for apophaticism in the first place. Ivan explains his position mathematically: human minds can only understand Euclidean geometry with its three dimensions of space. The idea put forward by non-Euclidean geometry that parallel lines might meet somewhere in infinity is beyond our ability to understand. “If I cannot understand even that,” he tells Alyosha, “then it is not for me to understand about God” (5:3:235).29
And yet, Ivan sincerely wishes to embrace God and esteems the idea of God highly. What intrigues him is not that man should have invented God, but that “such a notion—the notion of the necessity of God—could creep into the head of such a wild and wicked animal as man—so holy, so moving, so wise a notion, which does man such great honor” (5:3:234–35). Ivan goes even further. He confesses to Alyosha: “I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the Word for whom the universe is yearning, and who himself was ‘with God,’ who himself is God, and so on, and so on and so forth, to infinity” (5:3:235). Here, Ivan sounds like any Orthodox Christian. What gets in his way, however, is reason. And, though he admits that reason “is a scoundrel” that “hedges and hides” (5:3:236), he proceeds to base his rebellion against God and his world precisely on reason, namely the incomprehensibility of a God who would allow innocent children to suffer. He wants to understand how this could be or, failing that, to reject God altogether. He does not, however, understand the terms of his own apophaticism. God cannot be comprehended; on the contrary, human beings must renounce reason “in order to be able to attain in perfect ignorance to union with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge,” as Vladimir Lossky notes. One must “draw near to the Unknown in the darkness of absolute ignorance.”30 This is the apophatic lesson that Ivan must learn in the novel.
Father Zosima is the first person who seems to glimpse something apophatic about Ivan’s atheism. In particular, he sees how Ivan’s notion that “there is no virtue if there is no immortality” (1:6:70) hides an affirmation in its negative formulation. On the one hand, it proposes that, in the absence of God, “nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted, even anthropophagy” (2:6:69). It is thus a provocation: if you cannot prove the existence of God, then you cannot insist on virtue. On the other hand, Ivan’s formula can be read in the opposite fashion, as a negative affirmation of God, as Zosima hints when he tells Ivan: “You are blessed if you believe so, or else most unhappy!” (1:6:70). Ivan is unhappy if he truly does not believe in virtue, God, and immortality. He is blessed, however, if he is using this negative formulation as a way of journeying toward God. Zosima’s optimistic take goes something like this: God must exist, for I see that people are not devouring each other. There is virtue, so there must be God. In his response, Zosima reveals Ivan’s negative formulation as something that can affirm belief.
The most dramatic and weighty example of apophaticism in the novel is Ivan’s “poem” of the Grand Inquisitor. D. H. Lawrence characterized it as “the final unanswerable criticism of Christ,” a “deadly-devastating summing up” of how Jesus has failed humanity.31 Dostoevsky himself called Ivan’s poem “a powerful denial of God” in a diary entry.32 And yet, if there is any doubt that this bitter critique of Christ and Christianity, with its blasphemies, clever temptations, and damning indictments, can somehow be understood as an apophatic affirmation of Christ, one has only to listen to what Alyosha Karamazov says when his brother Ivan finishes narrating: “But . . . that’s absurd! Your poem praises Jesus, it doesn’t revile him” (5:5:260). Alyosha’s reaction is astounding, given what he has just heard in Ivan’s poem, and it is remarkable that so few critics have dwelt on its seeming inappropriateness. How does Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor poem, intended to be a damning denunciation of the incomprehensible and unfulfillable expectations of Christ’s teachings, wind up praising Jesus? It cannot, unless it does so apophatically, by articulating that which is not Christ.
Malcolm Jones mentions Alyosha’s reaction but does not connect it to apophatic theology.33 Joseph Frank also quotes Alyosha’s response, but provides the more conventional explanation that rebuking Christ for proclaiming mankind’s radical freedom is “in effect to praise Him for protecting the very foundation of man’s humanity as Dostoevsky conceived it.”34 Wil van den Bercken recognizes the negative theology at work in Alyosha’s statement, but argues that it leads to a cataphatic outcome. He declares this moment in the novel “the climax of apophasis: minus becomes plus, an explanation meant as a rejection turns out to be a defense.”35 But though he discerns the apophatic impulse of Alyosha’s response, Bercken does not identify the Grand Inquisitor text as a “traditional apophasis.” Rather, he argues that the Grand Inquisitor winds up making positive statements about Jesus and faith: “[E]verything the prelate denounces and criticizes in Jesus is exactly what Jesus wants to disseminate. [. . .] The Inquisitor’s indictment against Jesus is really an explanation of the nature of the Christian faith.”36 In so doing, however, Bercken actually undermines his apophatic analysis and replaces it with an argument that is much harder to support: that the Grand Inquisitor unwittingly preaches an Orthodox Christology. And yet, judging by what the Grand Inquisitor says about the devil’s three temptations of Christ (which the Inquisitor describes as containing “the entire future history of the world and mankind” [5:5:252]), he is actually distorting Christ’s pronouncements almost beyond recognition, and in the process, presenting a false Christ.
The idea in the first temptation that Christ rejected earthly bread and demanded of humanity only heavenly bread—that is, strict obedience to the word of God—is not, in fact, an explanation of Christ’s teaching but a misrepresentation of it. As Robin Feuer Miller points out, Christ’s answer that “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4) is not an either/or proposition: the precedence of the word of God does not make bread unimportant. Both are necessary, but God more so.37 The Inquisitor distorts this relationship. The Inquisitor’s interpretation of the second temptation—that Christ rejected miracles as an aid to faith—is also untrue. Jesus performed miracle after miracle during his earthly ministry and all of these miracles did, indeed, inspire or deepen the faith of those who witnessed them. The fact that these miracles did not ultimately make all human beings believe he was the Son of God or prevent his followers from lapsing in their faith is more a statement on human nature and the difficulty of belief than on the efficacy of miracles to aid faith. Again, the Inquisitor oversimplifies and, in so doing, misrepresents and misleads.
Finally, the Inquisitor’s assertion that Jesus’s rejection of earthly power (the third temptation) has created the circumstances in which only an elect few can possibly be saved is another distortion of Christ’s teaching. When the disciples, dismayed by Christ’s pronouncements about the difficulty of entering the kingdom of God, ask Jesus, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus answers: “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:25–26). Christ’s teachings may be hard and even unfulfillable, but with God’s grace, even the most unworthy may attain the kingdom of God. Semyon Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment articulates this idea well in his drunken speech to Raskolnikov about Christ on Judgment Day:
And when He has finished with everyone, then He will say unto us, too, “You, too, come forth!” He will say. “Come forth, my drunk ones, my weak ones, my shameless ones!” And we will all come forth, without being ashamed, and stand there. And He will say, “Swine you are! Of the image of the beast and of his seal; but come, you, too!” And the wise and the reasonable will say unto Him, “Lord, why do you receive such as these?” And He will say, “I receive them, my wise and reasonable ones, forasmuch as not one of them considered himself worthy of this thing . . .” And He will stretch out His arms to us, and we will fall at His feet. (1:2:23)
Marmeladov, it would seem, understands a lot more about the Christian faith than our Grand Inquisitor. Through God’s grace, all can be saved, even the most unworthy. It is thus difficult to see in any of the Inquisitor’s readings of the three temptations anything but a falsification of Christ’s teachings, not, as Bercken claims, an explanation of them. Falsifying Christ’s teachings, he falsifies Christ himself.
Alyosha recognizes this fact. What the Grand Inquisitor says about Christ is nothing like the Christ of the Gospels, nor can it be. His Christ is a negative distortion. “Miracle, mystery, and authority”—the pillars on which the Grand Inquisitor has created his deformed and perverse church—have nothing to do with Jesus, as the two acts Jesus performs in the poem remind us, an instance where Ivan seems to have sabotaged his own argument. Healing and forgiveness—Jesus’s raising of the dead child and the kiss he bestows on the Grand Inquisitor—are the essence of the Jesus of the Gospels and they help us to distinguish the real Christ from the false one of the Inquisitor. The “church” created by the Grand Inquisitor’s atheistic cabal—where the masses are bribed with bread, manipulated with “miracles,” and kept in blissful ignorance of the death of God—more closely resembles Shigalyov’s “unlimited despotism” than the “unlimited freedom” offered by Christ and decried by the Grand Inquisitor as an ideal too high and hard for humanity to accept. Alyosha grasps all of this immediately in his excited reaction to his brother’s poem: “Your poem praises Jesus, it doesn’t revile him.” The negative portrait of Jesus and his message in Ivan’s poem only serves to set off in vivid contrast the virtue of Christ and the Gospel he preached. Readers are meant to recognize this along with Alyosha. The Grand Inquisitor has declared not what Christ is, but what he is not. And in doing so, he has paradoxically revealed Christ in all of his goodness. He has given us a negative path toward Christ, who is to be found paradoxically in his absence.
Perhaps on a subconscious level Ivan actually realizes this, for he seems to slip into his anti-religious poem the dynamite capable of blowing it up, namely, the opposite of reason: the power of irrational love. The power of irrational love can be glimpsed first in the poem’s preface, where the Virgin Mary begs God to forgive even Christ’s tormentors (a potent example of the divine love of forgiveness of enemies that Christ himself taught) and later in the poem itself in Jesus’s acts of healing and forgiveness. If that were not enough, Ivan subsequently even renounces his poem in his discussion with Alyosha, calling it “nonsense” and “the muddled poem of a muddled student who never wrote two lines of verse” (5:5:262), as if acknowledging the dead end to which reason has brought him. Later in his hallucinatory interview with the devil, he forbids mention of the poem (11:9:648). He is ashamed because his apophatic poem has revealed an uncomfortable truth: his desire to believe despite the incomprehensibility of belief.
Even if Ivan’s poem is a negative path toward the Godhead, however, it is not yet a declaration of belief. He is still struggling with belief and does so until the end of the novel. But so, for that matter, is Alyosha, who confides to Lise at one point that he might not truly believe in God (5:1:220). Indeed, all of the Karamazovs, from father to sons, seem to embody opposing beliefs, an ability seemingly bred into them, as the prosecutor reminds us in his closing speech. Dmitry, he argues, personifies the “broad, Karamazovian nature [. . .] capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once,” that of “lofty ideals” and that of “the lowest and foulest degradation” (12:6:699). What Ivan and Dmitry exemplify here and throughout the novel, however, is that these extremes do not necessarily cancel each other out, but may, in a sense, actually heighten the apprehension of their opposite. In other words, unlike in Demons, where doublings and opposites end in diabolical inversions or tend to undo themselves, in Brothers Karamazov opposites are capable of enabling the realization of that which opposes them. This is an important point to remember and one that, while not apophatic in and of itself, contributes to the apophatic discourse in the novel.
Nowhere is this principle exemplified better than in Dmitry’s conflicted relationship with Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva. When he relates how he forces Katerina Ivanovna to visit his room to ask for the 4,500 rubles she needs to restore her father’s honor, Dmitry admits to Alyosha that he looked at her with “the kind of hatred that is only a hair’s breadth from love, the maddest love!” (3:4:114), echoing Tikhon’s statement about the proximity between complete atheism and complete faith. While Katerina’s love/hate relationship with Dmitry is a kind of “laceration” (nadryv—wounding oneself in order to wound others, wounding others to wound oneself38), Dmitry’s is precisely a hatred that is linked inextricably with love, a hatred that describes the paradoxical negative space from which the most complete love can be suddenly realized. It is thus a textual reflection of the apophaticism so pronounced elsewhere in the novel.
The apophatic impulse in Brothers Karamazov is so prominent partly because the novel makes so much use of irony and paradox to illuminate its moral and thematic subtleties and its image of Christ. While apophaticism is not a theology of opposites, it is a theology of paradox: you draw closer to God when you distance yourself from concepts of him. You may know God only when you do not know God. Perfect ignorance is a state that enables perfect knowledge of God, that is, union with him. There is an apophasis at work in apophaticism, a denial that we say or do what we say or do.39
Negative theology, however, has its own risks. In emptying oneself of all concepts of God, one may lose God as well. Like Dostoevsky’s paradoxical credo, apophaticism contains the seeds of its own undoing. If The Brothers Karamazov is an apophatic novel, then it, too, may lead us to a negative space from which it may be difficult to return. That is, indeed, where Dostoevsky leaves Ivan. His state of unconsciousness at novel’s end is symbolic of the state of apophatic darkness he has reached, but Dostoevsky does not say whether he will emerge from this state a convert to faith or a confirmed atheist. This tension underscores his special role in the novel and reminds us that it is Ivan, not Alyosha, who is the book’s key metaphysical quester. The novel’s greatest seeker of faith is actually its greatest skeptic.
Readers are so conditioned by what they read in the author’s preface about how Alyosha is the novel’s hero that they forget that all the seeking after God in the novel is on his brother Ivan’s part, not Alyosha’s. Alyosha may have a crisis of faith over his beloved elder’s conspicuously decaying body, but it is Ivan who undertakes a torturous search for God throughout the novel and suffers a mental collapse from the strain of it. In fact, rather than a hymn to the triumph of faith, The Brothers Karamazov is actually a book about the difficulty of believing. Doubt haunts all of the Karamazov brothers. Ivan rejects a God who would allow innocent suffering. Dmitry listens to Mikhail Osipovich Rakitin’s lectures about the French scientist Claude Bernard and declares that he’s sorry to lose God since all life boils down to chemical reactions. Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov reads the sayings of St. Isaac the Syrian as if repenting his parricide, but then commits suicide as a kind of ultimate rebellion against God. Even Alyosha has doubts about God’s existence. Unbelief permeates Dostoevsky’s apophatic inquiry.
It is not surprising, then, that while the ending of Brothers Karamazov seems to point to the ultimate victory of good figured in the joyous cries of “Hurrah for Karamazov!” that the boys shower upon Alyosha, in truth, Dostoevsky leaves important questions unresolved, especially about faith—a fitting outcome given the prominence of the book’s apophatic impulse. Dostoevsky does not say whether Dmitry will attempt to escape or serve out his sentence as an exercise in innocent suffering for the sake of the starving baby of his dream. Nor does he disclose whether Ivan will survive his brain fever and, if he does, whether he will turn away from his unbelief. Dostoevsky also does not say what will become of Alyosha or his own struggle with faith or whether he will marry Lise. Indeed, Alyosha’s warning to the boys that they or even he may need to be rescued from some great evil in the future by their shared memory of how they buried Ilyusha casts a slight pall over the novel’s conclusion. If speculation is true that Dostoevsky intended Alyosha to lose his faith in the novel’s sequel and make an attempt on the tsar’s life, it could confirm that Alyosha’s warning to the boys is well founded.40 The character in the book who seems most sure in his faith, Alyosha, may actually be poised on the threshold of unbelief, an opportunity for Dostoevsky to affirm the inverse of Tikhon’s formulation from Demons and investigate how faith may lead to unbelief, how a true believer actually stands on the next-to-last step to the most complete atheism.
Thus, instead of a conclusion that would definitively resolve the novel’s narrative and metaphysical questions, everything—most of all, the question of belief—is left up in the air. And yet, Dostoevsky’s reticence at the end of Brothers Karamazov, his reluctance to let faith have the final say, is, itself, characteristic of his apophatic approach to Christ and the Godhead. Ever fearful lest he say too much because “a thought once uttered is untrue,” Dostoevsky may well have thought it best to “be patient, humble, hold thy peace,” as Dmitry himself resolves, quoting the poet Fyodor Tyutchev (9:4:469), who warns us of the inadequacy of language in the task of true cognition. Dmitry finds out how easy it is for others to turn his own words against him in his interrogation by the police and subsequent trial. His lesson is one readers may apply to the text of the novel, where reticence on metaphysical matters emerges as one of the themes of the novel itself. If parody, paradox, and inversion have any kinship with the apophatic way in Dostoevsky’s works, it is in how they prevent us from drawing definitive conclusions about the workings of divine love, the meaning of Christ, or the nature of the Godhead. The most eloquent pronouncement on these things is sometimes silence, as Ivan’s Christ shows us in his response to the Grand Inquisitor. Dostoevsky leaves the important conclusions for his readers to intuit.
Dostoevsky admits as much in a July 1876 letter, in which he explains the danger of fully disclosing one’s thoughts: “Deploy any paradox you like, but do not explain it completely and everyone will think it is witty and subtle and comme il faut. But follow some risky pronouncement to its very end, declare, for instance, directly and without beating around the bush, ‘This is exactly what the Messiah is’ and no one will believe you precisely because of your naiveté, precisely because you disclosed your idea fully and said what you meant down to the last letter.” For this reason, Dostoevsky writes, “I have never allowed myself to spell out certain of my convictions or have my full say in my writings.”41 His implication is clear: better the negative way of disclosure than the explicit; the apophatic, not the cataphatic. Better a book where unbelief predominates, the better, perhaps, to glimpse belief.
This quality is especially apparent in the most Christocentric of all of his novels, The Idiot, in which Dostoevsky attempted to portray the nearest thing to Christ himself: Prince Myshkin, a “positively beautiful person” and the most important Christ figure in the writer’s oeuvre. In this instance, Dostoevsky’s apophaticism derives from an unexpected source: the writer’s use of comedy, which both conceals and reveals a distinct Christology. One might well ask, how can there be a comic Christology? Christ, after all, is not comic or ridiculous to any but unbelievers. And yet Dostoevsky’s exploration of the “ridiculous man” Myshkin can be looked at as an exercise in negative Christology par excellence. Comedy—always a fixture of the writer’s works—becomes in The Idiot the unexpected vehicle for a quite serious exploration of the nature and challenges of belief. How does Dostoevsky’s comic Christ figure serve as a via negativa that strips Christ of the conceptual language by which he is usually described? How does the ridiculous, comic or absurd aid true discernment of Christ?