The Aesthetics of God

The Brothers Karamazov. By Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The narrator of the new translation — in the Land of Oz all translations are new and so revolutionary you would never believe you were reading the same text — is forever saying, “of this, more later” and “and so on and so forth,” virtually an invitation to spin the wheels of your own imagination. He also says several times that The Brothers Karamazov is only the first half of a novel, the finished product to feature Alyosha as hero, but Dostoevsky never wrote the second half. What we have is enough, most read­ers probably think, nearly 800 pages of almost insu­perable complexity wherein it sometimes seems as if every word were folded over against another. And cer­tain words are more cunningly compounded than others. You have to look for them if you want to ferret out a theme or themes. And some of them are diffi­cult and perhaps embarrassing in modern American diction. The word “joy” is nearly impossible to say, owing to that college-girl waitress who is always slamming the plate on the table and squealing, “En­joy!” The word “beauty” is even worse. In the 1930s it was proscribed in the field of literary criticism among the Anglo-Saxons for being “subjective” and “religious.” Every reader of The Brothers Karamazov has a theory. Mine is the result of re-readings over a period of half a century. It is no worse than some I have heard.

Beauty is as near to being a central concept as one is likely to find: It bears on people’s passions, on art, and on God, as thought and felt and believed and worshiped in Orthodoxy — we suspect that Dostoevsky’s conception of a Catholic’s God re­sembles an eighth-grade arithmetic teacher plotting Jesuitical tyranny. So it is an Orthodox God, a Rus­sian Orthodox God, we would be at, and among His divine names none is more powerful than Beauty, all the more so because Beauty is also an alternative name for Art, even European Art. Not Ivan, although a poet, not even Alyosha, who likewise has his aesthetic side, is its spokesman as much as is poor, drunken, confused Dmitri. He is not confused on this issue, however, and here he is, fulminating at Alyosha: “Beauty is a fearful and terrible thing! Fear­ful because it’s undefinable, and it cannot be defined because God gave us only riddles. Here the shores converge, here all contradictions live together.” There, by the way, is a good brief description of The Brothers Karamazov in its aesthetic rather than in its philosophically misinterpreted reality (years ago I wearied of “existentialist” interpretations based on taking “The Grand Inquisitor” out of context and running with it). Beauty has a practical bearing. Moreover, because it applies to the body of Grushenka, which Dmitri wants and will have, no matter what, and his father also wants her almost as much. The metaphor of the shores converging sounds as if it came from the Book of Revelation and I doubt if it can be unpacked, not even by psychobabble. As for Beauty, Westerners, including Catholics, are afraid of it and will have as little of it as possible.

Here now is Dmitri on what some readers will identify as the underground-man metaphor, but I should prefer to call it the upward-thrust metaphor or, more simply, “joy” (especially recommended for believers who are persecuted or think themselves per­secuted — it might also be called the “defiance” meta­phor, religiously speaking): “If God is driven from the earth, we’ll meet him underground…from the depths of earth, we, the men underground, will start singing a tragic hymn to God, in whom there is joy! Hail to God and his joy! I love him!” (emphasis added). Say­ing “I love him!” — meaning God — just isn’t done in English and American literary circles. Imagine an American bishop or priest saying it. Clearly, there are great things to be learned if you once in a while escape the constriction of (even) Catholicism.

Catholicism indeed gets its licks in “The Grand Inquisitor,” a shockingly anti-Catholic performance, much celebrated by careless readers who fail to notice that in the preceding chapter Ivan enunciates, with the utmost insincerity, his conviction that he cannot accept the cosmos if it contains one suffering child. Ivan is of course looking for reasons to sustain his dis­belief, and he needs the disbelief because he is fright­ened of his own evil instincts, chiefly the wish to kill his father. “The Grand Inquisitor” is his “proof.” It naturally takes place in Spain and depends on belated horror. Alyosha sets Ivan right on a few minor par­ticulars while adding his own anti-Catholic slanders about the papacy (“simply the lust for power”). And finally it all comes out, for anyone paying attention, that “The Grand Inquisitor” is in support of Ivan’s dic­tum that if there is no God, as clearly there is not, “ev­erything is permitted,” and you may as well begin by killing your father because it was all his fault in the first place (cf. “patriarchy” in feminist discourse). All three legitimate Karamazov sons admit to murderous wishes against their obnoxious father, but he is in fact murdered by his illegitimate son, Smerdyakov, the offspring of Stinking Lizaveta, the town idiot. The copulation occurs in accordance with the old man’s claim that no woman is beyond the desire of a normal male, a proposition which happens to be true (but no one is thereby obliged to act on it). For years I have found it impossible to persuade American college stu­dents even to entertain such wanton immorality, for indeed Beauty is fearful and American students are nothing if not devotees of Rousseau. Smerdyakov is a true-blue liberal who as a child hangs cats and then conducts funeral rites for them.

Ivan will suggest and yet not suggest the killing of the father to Smerdyakov. Alyosha will tell Ivan, “It was not you!” — which is both true and false. “The Grand Inquisitor” is often published separately with the first half only (thus also out of context) of Notes From Underground. They make a pretty pair for the philosophically, theologically, and aesthetically naïve, and appear from time to time in college courses.

The Brothers Karamazov is stitched and bound with metaphors from literature, that is to say, it stitches and binds itself; it is, as who should say, “re­flexive.” The basic metaphors sometimes blend, as here the metaphor of Beauty and the metaphor of Uprise (or Downfall, for most of these metaphors have reversible engines). It is Dmitri once more, to Alyosha:

when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be.

Allusions to narrative art recur, as at the end when Alyosha proclaims the eschatological nature of fiction: “‘Karamazov,’ cried Kolya, ‘can it really be true as religion says, that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again…?'” There is the traditional teaching of the Resurrection with some additional sentiments, common enough, the meeting of lost loves. Then here is the special Dostoevsky note, in answer to the unasked question, but shall what we do? We shall “‘joyfully tell one another all that has been,’ Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy.” Half laugh­ing, comedy; half in ecstasy, worship; joy all over the place; beauty implied. It is all one. It is all narrative. It is The Brothers Karamazov splashed to the limits of the cosmos.

Even the moralizing of The Brothers Karamazov is given in literary form. The sayings and autobiography of the elder Zosima are edited and published by Alyosha “in the form of a narrative.” The major moral, hard to understand but easy to accept, is that “each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the com­mon guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth.” Such is Dostoevsky’s answer to Ivan’s doctrine that “all is permitted,” which turns out to be false doctrine, re­sulting in brain fever and possible insanity. Dostoevsky fancied that Book Six, “The Russian Monk,” would stand as antithesis to “The Grand Inquisitor,” but “The Grand Inquisitor” is too anti-Catholic and foolish for my taste — consider who wrote it, or, more accurately, remembered it, or even made it up as he went along, for it is one more mark against that fashionable document that it does not exist except as tavern conversation. But atheists buy anything so long as it is unreal. “The Grand In­quisitor” is much better answered in the later chapter called “The Devil.” Here Ivan acknowledges with shame his authorship of that debatable unwritten masterpiece.

Dostoevsky’s enemy is of course “science” and its bosom buddy “scientific socialism” — i.e., anti-Christianity. Here is Father Paissy’s rebuttal of it:

the science of this world, having united itself into a great force, has, especially in the past century, examined everything heavenly that has been bequeathed to us in sacred books, and, after hard analysis, the learned ones of this world have absolutely nothing left [left absolutely nothing?] of what was once holy. But they have examined parts and missed the whole, and their blindness is even worthy of wonder. Meanwhile the whole stands before their eyes as immovably as ever, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

The whole stands before their eyes: It is the Cre­ation as created by the Creator and it is The Brothers Karamazov as created by Fyodor Dostoevsky in emu­lation of it. The two wholes are, if you like, inter­changeable. I said earlier that the metaphor of the shores converging (as a definition of Beauty) could not be unpacked — i.e., analyzed, paraphrased — for the obvious reason that an ocean where the shores converge is no ocean at all, only dry land. But watch the metaphor reverse itself in the simile of Father Zosima, which contains all the other metaphors and controls not only the message but the structure of the book: “all is like an ocean; all flows and connects, touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”

This is my selective Catholic and literary reading of The Brothers Karamazov, to which I firmly believe all other matters may be accommodated. Virtually all the passages I have cited are from the first half of the novel and in the second half they simply roll. The “all are innocent/all are guilty” theme replays itself in the trial of Dmitri, who is convicted of murdering his fa­ther, although he did not. The teachings of Father Zosima are recapitulated and reapplied by Alyosha in his homily to the boys at the stone. At the trial, the speeches of the prosecutor and the defense attorney are in effect new novels and both are wrong. Each of them insults the other by calling his fabrications a “novel.” The prosecutor insists on “the whole,” but the whole he constructs is built on false facts. Con­versely, the defense attorney rejects the whole and stakes his case on single isolated facts, some of which are more plausible than others. The legal battle in the courtroom is one bad novel against another. The whole performance is drenched in scientism and new liberal anti-Christian ideologies. Nothing remains but The Brothers Karamazov.

I have been reading and commenting on the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. One chief benefit of this translation is its reliance in the Notes on Victor Terras’s A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Gen­esis, Language, and Style of Dostoevsky’s Novel (University of Wisconsin Press, 1981). There is a lot more of Terras than the translators make use of here, and much of it concerns the theological and aesthetic bearings of Orthodoxy. Anyone who wishes to pursue The Brother’s Karamazov should read that book and then perhaps in further pursuit send for the catalog of Eighth Day Books — it has a section called “Eastern Christendom” featuring mainly theological works in English. All Orthodox theology appears to have an aesthetic dimension which Catholic theology often lacks. Readers Catholic, Orthodox, or other should also know firsthand the Second Vatican Council’s Unitatis Redintegratio (Decree on Ecumenism), the part headed “The Special Position of the Eastern Churches.” The sacred Council declares in closing that “this entire heritage of spirituality and liturgy, of discipline and theology…belongs to the full catholic and apostolic character of the church.” All good­hearted people in good faith are permitted to attend Orthodox Masses, there to learn about bowing and kissing the icons and crossing yourself backward, and even to sense more deeply the inestimable value of Dostoevsky in his religious art, unrivaled in the Catholic West.