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1. A brief life of Fyodor Dostoevsky
Madonna Sophia Compton
Dostoevsky, thought by many to be an important novelist with
great psychological insight, was also deeply interested in the
religion and philosophy of his era. As an early child, he fell in love
with literature, reading everything he could get his hands on. He
was the son of a doctor, who was nonetheless an alcoholic, and
whose fits of rage served as a model for the debaucherous Fyodor
Pavlovich in The Brothers Karamazov. Both of his parents died
while he was in his youth.
He attempted to join the army but became bored with it and within
three years he resigned and devoted himself to his literary career.
His first novel Poor Folk brought instant fame but his next
attempts at publishing were severely criticized. By that time,
(1849-54) Dostoevsky had joined a group of young revolutionaries
who followed the famed Belinsky in adapting the atheism of the
German philosopher Feuerbach. He became involved in the
emerging communism of the “Petrashevsky Circle” which was a
literary discussion group in St. Petersberg. They were perceived as
a radical group in the reactionary reign of Nicholas I; and he was
eventually arrested with 21 others and sentenced to death.
While awaiting the firing squad, which Dostoevsky would later
reflect upon much in his writings, his sentence was commuted, and
he was sentenced to Siberia for four years. On the way there, a
woman gave him a copy of the New Testament, which he read
repeatedly. He later wrote to the woman who had given it to him:
“I am a child of unbelief and doubt but what fearful suffering this
desire to believe has caused me and still causes me, as it increases
in strength in my soul as the contrary proofs multiply!...But I do
believe there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more
sympathetic, more reasonable, and more perfect a man than
Christ...” (In Mathew Spinka, Christian Thought from Erasmus to
Berdyaev, p 197)
This love and fascination would remain for the rest of his life.
He later fell in love with a friend’s wife, Maria Dmitrievna, and
married her after his death. She is often painted as a neurotic

2. woman in several of his novels, and the marriage was not a very
good one. None of his journalistic adventures met with success and
in order to avoid debtor’s prison he was forced to go abroad to
Western Europe, where he eked out a living writing for various
magazines and gambling away the money he did make. He was
quite disillusioned with the decadence of the bourgeois of Europe,
but he managed to incorporate them into his early novels.
In was in the Brothers Karamazov that the greatest distinction was
drawn between the atheistic decadence of the upper classes and the
simplicity of the faith of the Russian peasants, of whom the
character of the holy Zosima, says: “God will save Russia through
the peasants...it is different with the upper classes. They, following
science, want to base justice on reason alone….[and they] often
proclaim that there is no such thing as sin...” In 1871 he returned
home to Russia, his debts having been forgiven by his second wife,
Anna Grigoryevna, with whom he shared a happy marriage for the
rest of his life. During this period he wrote his most famous
novels, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, The Possessed,
and theBrothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky is considered by some to be an existentialist writer,
always asking, through his characters, about the ‘eternal questions’
of existence and its repercussions in the human soul. He paints a
violent dislike for the nihilistic secularism in which the early
revolutionary socialism took root, as well as the materialism of
Europe, the scientism of emerging theorists like Auguste Comte,
and the wildly popular atheism of Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche’s
earlier work was artistically creative, his later philosophy was
darkly nihilistic. He began to believe that the instinct of the ‘master
soul’ was based on personal desire, which was its own justification,
and where conscience, pity, or remorse can find no entrance. Since
the instincts of the strong are to fight, to conquer, and to rule, the
goal of human effort should be the development of the ‘superman’;
or he who could rise out of the mire of mass mediocrity through
sheer will—a will to power.
For Dostoevsky, Nietzsche’s ‘Will-to-Power’ is really the fall of
man, i.e., the abuse of freedom is the source of humankind’s woes
and evils. Dostoevsky’s answer to Nietzsche’s will to power
is Crime and Punishment, where the main character considers

3. himself a superman, above the moral code of the ordinary ‘herd.’
However, after the murder he finds that he is exceedingly human
because he has a conscience.
One of the most erudite religious philosophers of Russia’s next
generation, Nicholas Berdyaev, believes that Dostoevsky portrays
a passionately exalted idea of the personality even in “the most
degraded specimens of mankind” because at the center of each
person’s being is an image of God stamped indelibly with the
burden of freedom. And when freedom is present, there also is evil;
and the secret of life and destiny depends, for Dostoevsky, on this
notion. Freedom is the source of all tragedy in history and emerges
in Dostoevsky’s characters in various contradictions, or what is
often referred to in Russian theology as “antinomies.” Slightly
different than the antinomy of Kant, where it is a contradiction, in
Russian philosophical thought, the antinomies express a living
experience in all its paradoxes and connects them.
This is most apparent in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, in
which Ivan, one of the principle characters in Brothers
Karamazov summarizes for his brother an anecdote, after
ruminating about why innocent children should suffer. The story
goes like this. Ivan, himself a disreputable and somewhat sordid
character, imagines that Christ has returned to earth during the
period of the Spanish Inquisition. He is recognized by an aging
Inquisitor who has executed many heretics and who promises to
burn Christ at the stake the next day. But during the interim he
would like Christ to explain why he has never exercised his divine
authority. For this, indeed, is why the world is so chaotic: Christ
has valued human freedom too highly—by his miracles alone,
Christ could have convinced the masses of his majesty: why did he
not come down from the cross?
However, this is the trick of Satan in the desert temptation: to
demonstrate his divine power. Is it not a human need to prove our
human worth? But Jesus does not fall for it. The Inquisitor accuses
Christ of rejecting his own divine authority, choosing instead all
that was “enigmatic and vague” as a way of throwing people back
upon their own choices. He would not come down from the cross
because he did not want to enslave man by such a miracle; rather

4. he “hungered for freely given love.” And the price for this was
great suffering.
Ivan here represents the Westernized Russian: the educated man of
science who is essentially agnostic because there is suffering and
evil in the world. “I can’t expect to understand God,” he says to his
brother Alyosha, who is planning to be a monk, because “I have a
Euclidian earthly mind.” He cannot accept the world into which
God has thrown his children and blames God for not eliminating
evil from his scheme of existence. Suffering, for Ivan, drives one
into bitterness. For Alyosha, who has been studying the teachings
of the holy monk Zosima, suffering leads to redemption, because it
purifies and ennobles the human spirit.
Likewise, in “The Possessed” (also called “The Devils” in the
original Russian) Dostoyevsky paints a terrifying vision of a
despotic regime that promises a transformation of the old society
into a super-human one. But the cost of this absolute guarantee of
future satiety (through revolutionary anarchy) is despotic
tyranny. Perhaps a criticism of Nietzsche’s superman, the ‘hero’ of
such a revolution is a self-appointed architect of an idealized
society, who is himself so driven by his lust for power that he
becomes a depersonalized hollow stranger who believes that “the
Russian God has already been vanquished by cheap vodka.”
The idea behind Dostoyevsky’s resistance to the concept of the
‘ideal society’ is that it presupposes that human happiness needs to
be legislated and its burdens shouldered by those few who can
guard the curse of the garden: the knowledge of good and evil. In
the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor Christ walks away from the
dictatorship of a well-governed world, and is again tried as a
heretic. At the end, he kisses the Inquisitor on the mouth. “That
was his only answer.” And again he is murdered for his
incomprehensible silence. Christ’s kiss is also the Word again
made flesh, an embodied gesture of Love: the only response to the
Inquisitor’s lengthy verbiage about the horrible price of freedom.
Dostoyevsky’s writings seem to pivot around a central theme and
seems to verify that the copy of the New Testament he received in
prison changed his life forever. That view is rooted in the idea
that the highest value is the redeemed human being; but alongside

5. it is the freedom of response. God will not accept response to his
love unless it is freely given. Dostoyevsky also was profoundly
concerned about his mother-land and gave the example of the
monk Zosima as the religiously transformed individual who would
serve as the model of redemption. The monasticism of Russia was
for him a symbol not of asceticism but as a sort of mystical
consecration and willingness to serve the world, rather than master
it.
The philosopher Berdyaev has said that Christ, for Dostoyevsky, is
the true image of the God-man,: “for Godmanhood unites human
freedom with the divine freedom, the human image with the divine
image…But Christ is not an external law, an external rule of
life. His kingdom is incompatible with the kingdom of this
world.” This is why Zosima is the symbol of the transformed
Christ-like soul who would hopefully serve as the image of
Russia’s salvation, not the revolution that was beginning to
foment. Of this, he was, indeed, very wary.
And in this, perhaps, he was something of a prophet. For Russia
was about to enter one of its darkest hours. Dostoyevsky died in
1881, his faith having grown through his struggles. He once told a
colleague, ‘even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay
outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than
with the truth."
Reflections
“Love a [man] even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine
Love, and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the
whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of
God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love
everything…Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest
of all things, and there is nothing else like it….” Zosima
in Brothers Karamazov
Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them; let all the trees of
the forest sing for joy. Psalm 96:12

6. “He longed to forgive everyone for everything and to beg
forgiveness. Oh not for himself, but for all people, for all and for
everything…But with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were,
tangibly, that something firm and unshakable as that vault of
heaven had entered into his soul….He had fallen on the earth a
weak boy, but he rose up a resolute champion and he knew and felt
it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. And never, never, all
his life long, could Alyosha forget that minute.” Brothers
Karamazov
“For you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to
give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness
of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the
rising sun will come to us from heaven.” Luke 1:76-78
“If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not
only love but every living force on which the continuation of all
life in the world depended, would dry up at once.” Brothers
Karamazov
Nevertheless, the firm foundation of God stands, having this seal,
"The Lord knows those who are His" 2 Timothy 2:19
“Why hast Thou come to interfere with us?…Thou didst desire
[man’s] free love, that he should freely follow Thee, being
fascinated and captivated by Thee. Instead of the rigid, ancient law,
man should decide for himself with a free heart what is good and
what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his
example…Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would
remain satisfied with God alone…” Inquisitor to Christ
“As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you,
my God.” Psalm 42:

7. “To transform the world, to recreate it afresh, people must turn into
another path psychologically. Until you have become really, in
actual life, a brother [or sister] to everyone, the human family will
never come to be [as a family.] No sort of scientific teaching, no
kind of common interest will ever teach human beings to share
property and privileges with equal consideration for all.” Zosima
in Brothers Karamazov
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be
filled.” Mat. 5: 5-6
“You would go into the world offering people some kind of
freedom which they, in their simplicity…cannot even comprehend,
and which they fear and dread—for there has never been anything
at any time more insufferable for the human society than freedom!
But do you see these stones in the barren wilderness glowing with
heat? Turn them into bread and humankind will run after Thee like
a flock, grateful and obedient…But you did not desire to…You
thought to yourself: what kind of freedom is it, where obedience is
bought with bread?” Inquisitor to Christ
“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my
voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person,
and they with me.” Revelation 3:20
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear the
most….It takes something more than intelligence to act
intelligently.” Crime and Punishment

8. “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your
God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my
righteous right hand.” Isaiah 41:10