"It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus
Christ.
My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt."
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky
Orthodox Convert
1821–1881 (January 28/February 9)
On February 9, 1881, Feodor Dostoevsky parted this world as his family read to him the Gospel parable of the prodigal son. This article in Orthodox America from the 100th anniversary year of Dostoevsky's death commemorates the great writer, and shows his significance to the Orthodox Church.
Feodor Dostoevsky on his
deathbed
January 28/February 9 of this year (1981) marked the hundredth
anniversary of the death of Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, the great Russian writer who
was probably the most powerful Orthodox voice in the world literature of recent
centuries. In marking this anniversary with an Ukase decreeing the celebration
of memorial Services for him in all dioceses, as well as recommending
gatherings and lectures devoted to him, the Synod of Bishops of the Russian
Church Outside of Russia noted that "his creative activity was highly
valued by outstanding church thinkers. His burial is remembered as an
extraordinary event, and in the name of the St. Alexander Neysky Lavra (in
Petersburg) his widow was asked to bury him precisely there, since Fyodor
Michailovich was a defender of Orthodoxy."
Unlike
most Russian novelists and writers of the 19th century, Dostoevsky's intent in
his creative activity was precisely to exemplify Orthodox principles. After a
youthful fascination with Western ideas and his involvement with a
socialist-revolutionary group, Dostoevsky returned from a term of exile in
Siberia fully converted to the truth of Orthodoxy and resolved to use his
literary talent to defend this truth against its many enemies, and to
illuminate with its light the spirit of his times. In The Possessed (literally,
“The Demons”), he made a devastatingly precise analysis of the radical
revolutionary mind and foresaw the hundred million people it would be necessary
to kill to make the revolution successful in Russia (Solzhenitsyn has noted the
exact correspondence to the number of victims of Soviet Communism). In Crime
and Punishment he traces the effect of the philosophy of nihilism (the
foundation of the revolution) on one person’s soul, and its salvation by
Christianity. In “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers
Karamozov, he set forth the difference between the Western distortion of
Christianity and true Orthodoxy, and in The Diaspora of a West he showed
further the underlying unity of papalism and socialism and their ultimate merger
in the reign of Antichrist. In these and other books he laid bare the intent
and the final goal of modern secular humanism: a society without God. He
expressed the "theological'' definition of this goal several years before
Nietzche in the West: There is no God (or: there is no immortality), therefore
everything is permitted. But unlike Nietzche, whose inability to believe drove
him insane, Dostoevsky with his diagnosis gave also the answer to this modern
sickness of the soul: a return to the fundamentals of Orthodox Christianity.
Dostoevsky
was a passionate man and had many falls and mistakes. But he is remembered as
one who, being a thoroughly "modern'' man who had come to see the
"one thing needful" in life, offered a sincere struggle against his passions
and helped us all to see more clearly the nature of the workings of passion and
sin in fallen man. Elder Ambrose of Optina said of Dostoevsky, after he visited
the monastery, that he was "one who is repenting.'' Thus he is closer to
today's Orthodox converts than many more perfect men, such as the great Russian
ascetics of the 19th century, and can help to open up to them the way to the
saving truth of Orthodoxy. Above all, his compassionate portraits of the
suffering and downtrodden, and even of those possessed by passions, can help
Orthodox converts to develop the basic Christian concern and compassion which
are so often lost sight of in our overly intellectual times.
09 / 02 / 2012
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