parresia

Ivan's Mistake

Grand Inquisitor

Since I'm under oath not to blog until I finish a certain task, allow me to bend the rule by merely posting some quotes. These are taken from an article by Ralph Wood called "Ivan Karamazov's Mistake." The article serves primarily as a commentary on Dostoyevsky's most famous chapter, The Grand Inquisitor, which is found in Brothers Karamazov. Wood's article ran in the December 2002 issue of First Things..

Western readers of The Brothers Karamazov have remained virtually blind to Dostoyevsky’s critique of the Grand Inquisitor. The reason, I believe, is that Ivan’s vision of human freedom is so very near to our own secular notion of liberty, and thus to our increasing relegation of the Christian gospel to the private sphere of mere preference. Though he was a student of Western Christianity and culture, Dostoyevsky remained fundamentally Russian in his conception of God and the world, of good and evil, of the sacred and the secular. We cannot properly understand his treatment of these matters, therefore, until we grasp his Orthodox reading of them. Thus we must examine his parable of the Grand Inquisitor vis-à-vis the Orthodox doctrine of human freedom as being founded not on autonomous choice but on communal dependence on God.

In the "Cana of Galilee" chapter, Alyosha learns that miracles do not precede and thus produce faith; rather, they follow faith as the by-product of the transformed life.

In a nightmare interview with the Devil, Ivan is made to recognize his own moral culpability for his father's death. He had poisoned Smerdyakov's mind with the demonic gospel that God is dead and that all things are permitted. Acting out what Ivan had intellectually advocated, Smerdyakov has killed old Fyodor in a dreadful demonstration that, in a godless world, absolutely nothing is forbidden.

Alyosha's idea of freedom is communal because it is first of all religious. Athanasius of Alexandria articulated it most clearly in the fourth century: "God became man so that man might become God." The central Orthodox doctrine is called theosis or theopoesis-- the divinizing or deifying of humanity. The Eastern Church does not call for believers to imitate Jesus through the exercise of moral choice. It summons them rather to participate in the life of Christ through the transformative power of the liturgy and sacraments of the Church. To become persons in the true sense is to become what the New Testament calls "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).

Not sharing the Western doctrine of original sin, the Orthodox hold that every person retains an efficacious awareness of God, even after the Fall. “Just because it is light,” writes Vladimir Lossky, “grace, the source of revelation, cannot remain within us unperceived. We are incapable of not being aware of God…”

“Death for a person,” declares Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas, “means ceasing to love and to be loved, ceasing to be unique and unrepeatable, whereas life for the person means the survival of the uniqueness of its hypostasis [personification], which is affirmed and maintained by love.”

To possess true freedom and personhood through love is, in Dostoyevsky’s view, to suffer rightly. It is to accept responsibility, not for one’s own sin, but also for the sins of others.