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One of the biggest obstacles to understanding The Brothers Karamazov and Dostoevsky in general is that the world he is writing about is quite different from the world in which most of us live today.
Even when I first went to Russia, in the latter years of the twentieth century, I found it to be at times startling different from the Britain in which I had grown up. Here was a country that for the most part had not gone through the upheaval of the 1960s. It had next to no experience of immigration from places anywhere other than the former Soviet Union. People appeared to have a morality that was similar to Britain in the 1940s. Most startling of all, and a huge surprise to me, was that Christian faith was alive and well. Ordinary people believed, even if they sometimes had little conception of what they were believing. In busses, it was common to come across icons. There were newly-built churches and people went to them. Moreover, when I talked to people, I often found that they really did believe and believed quite literally.
How much stranger still, is the Russia from the time of The Brothers Karamazov? Faith is at the heart of the novel, and unless you can overcome the barriers to reading about this faith, you will get little from the novel. If you simply dismiss it, then why read The Brothers Karamazov? It has nothing to say to you. Really. Nothing at all. Read something else.
Nowhere is this distance better shown than in Book two chapter three, “Women of Faith.” The elder Zozima has gone out to speak to some women who have been waiting to talk to him. One of them approaches on her knees asking for absolution and says, “I have sinned, dear father, I am afraid of my sin” (p. 51).
How many of us nowadays talk about having sinned? It is a concept that belongs almost exclusively to a church ritual that for most of us is dead. Yet this woman is not talking ritually. She is talking quite literally. But more startling yet, when did you last hear someone say they were afraid of sin. What is there to be afraid of?
Imagine if I have done some wrong – nothing illegal, but something that I consider to be wrong. No-one knows about it and it seems I’ve got away with it. Why would I be afraid? Of what would I be afraid? I might have told my husband a lie. I might have had an affair with someone else. But given that no-one will ever know, in what sense can I be said to be afraid of this “sin.” It is hard to imagine anyone in contemporary Britain feeling sin in this way, let alone being afraid of it. This is the distance between us and the time of which Dostoevsky is writing.
The woman goes on to describe her sin. She says “My married life was hard, he was old, he beat me badly. Once he was sick in bed. I was looking at him and I thought: What if he recovers, gets up on his feet again, what then? And then the thought came to me …” (p. 51). This doesn’t seem to be much of a sin. Indeed, in our modern world, we would certainly describe the husband as the sinner rather than the wife. He has committed the unforgivable sin of beating his wife. What did she do? She didn’t actually do anything. She certainly didn’t do anything that anyone else could ever find out. All that happened was that one day, she hoped that her husband wouldn’t get well. That, I think, must be the thought that occurred to her. She didn’t do anything about it. She didn’t put him out of his misery. She just thought it might be easier for me if he didn’t recover. Which of us has not thought something similar to this even when we have never been beaten?
The woman then goes on to describe how she has come about 100 kilometres to see the elder. She has been feeling this sense of sin for three years and that the grief has made her ill. In today’s world, if I talked to a priest and said once three years ago I wished that my husband was dead because we had a terrible argument, but now I’m sorry about it, the priest I imagine would simply say that this is nothing at all. Everyone has idle thoughts. If the worst thing that I ever did was to think such thoughts I wouldn’t be much of a sinner. But the elder takes the woman very seriously. The reason is that the woman is afraid of her sin. But in what does the fear consist?
She says “I am afraid, afraid to die.”
Here we begin to overcome the distance between Dostoevsky’s time and today. No matter how much we have renounced religion most of us are still afraid to die.
In wartime, there are some people like Siegfried Sassoon who behave recklessly, who are in a sense not afraid to die. I imagine this is one way of coping with combat. But most soldiers do not behave in this way. Most are very much afraid to die.
The modern world in which we live is far safer than the world in which Dostoevsky’s characters lived. Many diseases have been defeated by medicine. War is less common than it once was. Yet we share the fear of this woman. Or do we?
What is she afraid of? Is it death? In part it is death. But really she is afraid of dying with a sin that has not been absolved. So the distance between her and us opens up again. Which of us is scared of dying with a sin rather than simply dying?
The elder responds to the woman’s fear in this way: “Do not be afraid of anything, never be afraid, and do not grieve. Just let repentance not slacken in you, and God will forgive everything” (p. 52). Why should I not grieve? It is for the same reason that I should not be afraid. If there is nothing to be afraid of about death then there is nothing to grieve. The concept of grief implies that death involves loss. Well, naturally I am afraid of losing something precious in myself and with regard to others. But if God preserves everything and everyone, then there is nothing to grieve and also nothing to fear.
But does God save everyone? This is an interesting concept. All along most of us have had an idea that Christianity involves a sorting of the sheep from the goats and that only the virtuous will be saved. Is Zosima saying that everyone will be saved? Perhaps he is, but not quite I think. It is conditional. If you repent continuously, you will be saved.
But why should repentance matter so much? Does God need this repentance to save me? Is it some sort of bargain? But Milton is right in this respect: “God doth not need either man’s work or his own gifts.” God needs nothing from me. It is simply presumptuous to suppose that God requires my repentance or indeed my praise. He may want these things. He may love me and want what is best for me. But he has no need.
The elder goes on. “There is not and cannot be in the whole world such a sin that the Lord will not forgive one who truly repents of it.” This answers the question that sometimes comes up in theology. But what of Judas? Is Judas damned? Did he commit the unforgivable sin? The problem for Judas is perhaps that he died before he had the chance to fully repent. No sin is unforgivable but it is possible to die without repenting. It is this that we should be afraid of.
But why should repenting be so crucial? I think the elder answers this question. He says, “If you are repentant, it means that you love. And if you love, you already belong to God.”
The self is a relation that relates itself to itself and in doing so relates to another. This other is God and also other people. But the way that it relates is through love. Sin means that I cannot love myself and cannot love other people. Sin puts forward a barrier to the authenticity and the directness of the relationship. The woman’s sense of sin means that she cannot love herself and cannot love the memory of her husband. It is this that hinders her sense of self. And it is for this reason that she is afraid to die. To die when full of self-hatred and hatred to God is to die without a soul. There is nothing for God to save. But if by loving God and loving yourself then this creates the soul that God can save.
Thus the elder advises, “Do not be upset with people, do not take offense at their wrongs. Forgive the dead man in your heart for all the harm he did you, be reconciled with him truly.” If I am upset with people, if I take offence, then I cease to love them. But in doing so, I damage myself. My self is my relationship with them. If it is loving, then my relation to self and my relation to others is strong. But if there is hate in my self, then I fail to be an authentic self at all. Even when her husband did her great wrong, she must forgive both him and forgive herself for the thoughts that she had about him.
This may all seem terribly unlikely. But it is important to realise that the self is such that it is beyond our understanding. The elder says, “Believe that God loves you so that you cannot conceive of it, even with your sin and in your sin he loves you.” The relationship that we have to God cannot be comprehended and cannot properly be thought. In the past people simply accepted this. Now we are in rebellion. Because we do not understand Christianity we reject it. But we are rejecting ourselves.
What saves the soul and what is the condition for immortality is that we love both ourselves and others. Above all we must love God. But it is not a bargain. God is not choosing between the sheep and the goats. Rather we are choosing by our loving or failing to love to be a soul or not to be a soul. The tragedy of atheism is that it is correct. By failing to love himself and by failing to love God, the atheist condemns himself.
Or perhaps there is hope. The elder concludes “Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people’s sins. Go and do not be afraid.”
Perhaps by loving the person who rejects God, it is possible to redeem him. Perhaps praying for the soul of someone who never believed he had one is enough to keep flickering that flame. These are all speculations. We know nothing of these things and we are all just guessing.
There is a barrier to getting into Dostoevsky’s world. You need to leap over the time between now and then. To many this story of someone being afraid of sin and how they can cease to be afraid will simply be rejected as odd views that we no longer need to consider because we are more enlightened. Fair enough; if that is your view, I cannot prove it to be false. I can prove nothing. Nothing whatsoever. My speculations are idle. But if you really think that. If you are sure that faith is all lies and nonsense, you will gain nothing from The Brothers Karamazov. Better by far to find another book to read.
Sources
Fyodor Dostoesvky. The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, Vintage, 1992.
Come back next week for Chapter 2: A Lady of Little Faith.