So we were all damned to hell last week. It falls to Zosima to bring us out. Of course—the question is—does Dostoevsky’s account of Zosima provide the answer to Ivan and the Inquisitor’s devastating critique of faith in the previous section. Apparently, Dostoevsky worried about the adequacy of his response, too. Robin Feuer Miller points out that right before the serial portion of his section “The Russian Monk” was due to be released, he wrote to a friend doubting whether his Grand Inquisitor blasphemy would be answered well enough by the holy monk. What I think we need to realize here at the very beginning is that the answer Zosima is supposed to give is not Euclidean. The kiss of Christ and Alyosha which we talked about last week should clue us in—Dostoevsky is not going to provide a logical mock-trial-like rebuttal to the atheist’s charges. Dostoevsky rather recognizes that both the argument for and the argument against faith are ultimately stories. Ivan’s arguments culminate in “prose poem.” And Zosima life story acts in the same way. In fact, Dostoevsky seems to go out of his way to highlight the narrative aspect of his argument: commenting again and again that his account was told to him, and he cannot be sure the words he recounts are true to what was originally said.
Ivan—despite his prose poem—wants to believe that his arguments are Euclidean, logical, empirical even. Children suffer. Horribly. And would you, if offered the chance to be the architect of this moral scheme accept if you knew that just one child would suffer the cruelty that Ivan describes? It’s a devastating proposition. This is the classic “problem of evil” in its most dreadful formulation.
Like Ivan, Zosima will begin by stating the problem of evil, and then move on (like the Grand Inquisitor) to show how mystery, miracle, and authority can save (rather than enslave).
Dostoevsky very clearly does not engage the problem of evil head-on (which distresses some; and we’ll come back to this point). Zosima introduces the question by discussing his childhood readings of Job. He is distressed by Job’s sufferings, and is dissatisfied about the resolution of the story. Can God’s replacement of his sons and daughters actually be expected to make Job feel good? How can a man even love his “replacement” children when every time he looks in their faces, he sees the dead faces of his first children? And all this is done so that God can boast to Satan: “See what my saint can suffer for my sake!” What the hell kind of justice is that? Forget about Job, who among us would actually feel comfortable acting like God in that situation?
This is where Dostoevsky suspends us briefly—leaving us exactly where Ivan had left us a few chapters before. In Ivan’s narrative, this tension, this dissonance is “resolved” by the Inquisitor, who asserts his authority to mitigate the evils of the world. Says the Jesuit: the world is evil and unjust. So I must impose my authority on them so that they might be fed as well as possible. They will have to give up their freedom, but it will be worth it. The Inquisitor assumes authority (along with its attendant miracles and mystery). What Zosima teaches, in contrast, is that all must be responsible for all. The Inquisitor (representing, I think, both the late medieval Western church and early modernism) sets up false sacraments and symbols of authority, and places them on a very high shelf where very few can reach. Zosima offers authority, miracle, mystery—the whole package deal—to everyone. Not in the false universalism of the French Enlightenment, or of Kant, or of Marx’s proletariat. But personally and intimately and sacrificially.
Zosima relates his story of how, as a young soldier, he was to face an enemy in a duel. But he remembers back to his godly brother (who died when he was young) and what he had said to Zosima and his servants when dying:
“’My good ones, my dears, why are you serving me, why do you love me, and am I worthy of being served?’ ‘Yes, am I worthy?’ suddenly leaped into my mind [says Zosima]. Indeed, how did I deserve that another man, just like me, the image and likeness of God, should serve me?”
The bitterness which Zosima had allowed to fester in himself when reading Job so many years before had killed the seed of faith. But here, years later, he found the seed had matured and brought forth fruit. Zosima bows before his enemy (a posture he would come to be in very often) and begs forgiveness.
Zosima’s ethic is foundation and practical. Countering Marx: All men and all stations in life can be good and necessary; only live as though they are as free as you would wish yourself to be, remembering like Zosima the words: “Am I worthy, such as I am, that another should serve me, and that, because he is poor and untaught, I should order him about? ….See to it that [even] your servant is freer in spirit than if hew were not a servant…. Why can my servant not be like my own kin, so that I may finally receive him into my family, and rejoice for it?”(317)
Zosima counters Nietzsche: “[Do not] fear the noble and powerful, but be wise and ever gracious. Know measure, know the time, learn these things. When you are alone, pray. Love to throw yourself down on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it, tirelessly, insatiably, love all men, love all things, seek this rapture and ecstasy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears.” (322) For Zosima, humility is salvation. Humility before your brother is his salvation. Nobility in itself is therefore unworthy of us, because it exalts the individual above others.
Zosima also counters Kant. Kant wanted an abstract ethic, where some vaporous standard of Reason would bind all men to a common purpose. But Kant’s universal ethic was not personal. Personal circumstances, loves, biases, and sins would only mess up Kant’s universal kingdom. People are too darn complicated. Reason stands above all that. And for this, Zosima says: such a mentality is an absence of true, personal love, and is therefore the very essence of hell. “This fortunate being rejected the invaluable gift, did no value it, did not love it, looked upon it with scorn, and was left unmoved by it…. And he beholds paradise, and could rise up to the Lord, but his torment is precisely to rise up to the Lord without having loved, to touch those who loved him—him who disdained their love.” (322)
All these other mindsets have as their stumbling block the sin of pride. In order to accept personal responsibility for others, it is necessary to humble oneself before them, as Father Zosima illustrates when he kneels before Dmitri Karamazov and in showing kindness in response to the insults of the Karamazov patriarch. The difference between Zosima and Ivan (and Kant and Marx and so on) is that Zosima is willing to debase himself before the base, and to love the unlovely. Ivan is willing to occasionally love a beautiful blue sky or a person who shows him kindness precisely because it does not impose on his own self-dignity. His autonomous selfhood and his superiority remain intact.
In contrast to Ivan, Zosima’s universal-personal ethic requires a certain kind of existential leap. While Ivan struggles to maintain his ethical freedom, Zosima surrenders his freedom to a higher authority in order to receive it again. As Robin Miller points out, “true authority transfigures and disperses itself into responsibility, a radically egalitarian responsibility of each for all and all for each.” This paradox is decidedly non-Euclidean, and therefore escapes Ivan entirely. How can a man lose his individuality only to gain the salvation of others?
So we come back to the problem of evil. Has Zosima answered it? Cut through the rhetoric. What does Zosima say to the Grand Inquisitor and to the child who was pulled apart by his master’s dogs?
Dostoevsky and Zosima in some ways give no answer. With his account of the sufferings of children, Ivan breaks your heart. And Zosima says, let it stay broken. Your heart must stay broken. Look at the suffering children. Observe them. Listen to them cry. Then do something. Love them. Embrace them. Bow before them and ask their forgiveness even when you have done nothing to offend them—for you are as guilty of their suffering as the one who actually hurt them.
There is evil in the world, Zosima says. And God allows it. But why? The answer, besides being contained in all of Zosima’s teaching, is given away before you even read the authorial preface: it’s epitaph: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). Dostoevsky beats this principle into us throughout the novel: salvation comes through death and suffering. Zosima’s death brings salvation to Alyosha in a way he had not known it before. He comes to terms with his calling, and begins to the see and love not just God, but the world which God made (think of his echoing of Ivan’s words as his own to Rakitin). Ilyushechka’s death brings salvation to his father and his boyhood friends. Fyodor Pavlovitch’s death, too, brings salvation—ultimately—to Dmitri. And I think you can even see that Smerdyakov’s death might hint at the salvation of Ivan.
I think that if you return to Ivan’s nasty proposition to Alyosha (would you be the Creator of this world if you knew the suffering that would happen in it)—the proper answer would be a quiet but confident, Yes. God knew what He was doing. Greater things come out of suffering and death. That is—if we “kiss the earth and love it, tirelessly, insatiably, love all men, love all things.”
