Dostoevsky
so long as he _is_ this will.”[95]
But this pessimism (which in Schopenhauer can at times virtually have
the air of a disguise) yields place in Dostoevsky to a boundless
optimism.
“If you were to give me three lives, it wouldn’t be enough for me,”[96]
says one of his characters in _A Raw Youth_. In another passage of the
same book:
“You so want to live and are so thirsting for life that I do believe
three lives would not be enough for you.”[97]
I should like to investigate further this blissful state Dostoevsky
depicts, or of which he gives us a glimpse, in each of his works, a
state wherein we lose all sense of personal limitation and of the
flight of time.
“At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin, “I seem somehow
to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more
time.”[98]
And compare this eloquent passage from _The Possessed_:
“‘Are you fond of children?’ asked Stavrogin.--‘I am,’ answered
Kirillov, though rather indifferently.--‘Then you are fond of
life?’--‘Yes, I’m fond of life. What of it?’--‘Though you’ve made up
your mind to shoot yourself?’--‘What of it? Why connect it? Life’s
one thing, and that’s another. Life exists, but death doesn’t at
all.’--‘You’ve begun to believe in future eternal life?’--‘No, not in
a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are moments,
you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still and it will become
eternal.’”[99]
I could multiply my quotations, but these doubtless will suffice.
I am struck, every time I read the Gospels, by the insistence with
which the words, “_Et nunc_,” “_And now_,” are repeated over and over
again. And certainly Dostoevsky too was struck by it. Everlasting
bliss, the bliss promised by Jesus Christ, can be attained here and
now, if only the human soul will forswear and deny itself. _Et nunc._...
Eternal life is not, or rather is more than, a thing of the future, and
if we do not reach it in this world, there is little hope of our ever
attaining to it. Listen to these admirable pages from Mark Rutherford’s
_Autobiography_:
“As I got older, I became aware of the folly of this perpetual reaching
after the future, and of drawing from to-morrow--and from to-morrow
only--a reason for the joyfulness of to-day. I learned, when, alas!
it was almost too late, to live in each moment as it passed over my
head, believing that the sun as it is now rising is as good as it ever
will be, and blinding myself as much as possible to what may follow.
But when I was young I was the victim of that illusion, implanted for
some purpose or other in us by Nature, which causes me on the brightest
morning in June to think immediately of a brighter morning which is
to come in July. I say nothing now for or against the doctrine of
immortality. All I say is, that men have been happy without it, even
under the pressure of disaster, and that to make immortality a sole
spring of action here is an exaggeration of the folly which deludes
us all through life with endless expectation, and leaves us at death
without the thorough enjoyment of a single hour.”
Cheerfully would I cry: “What betides life eternal, without
ever-present consciousness of that eternity even now? Eternal life can
be present in us here below. We are partakers in it from the moment we
are resigned to die to ourselves and accomplish the surrender which
enables us to resurrect straightway into eternity!”
Neither behest nor ruling: simply the secret of the supreme felicity
revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospels. “_If ye know these things,
happy are ye if ye do them_” (John xiii. 17). Not “_happy shall ye
be_” but “_happy are ye_.” Here and now we can share in that perfect
bliss.
What serenity! Time indeed ceases to exist: eternity lives, we inherit
the Kingdom of God.
Yes, here is the mysterious essence of Dostoevsky’s philosophy and of
Christian ethics too; the divine secret of happiness. The individual
triumphs by renunciation of his individuality. He who lives his life,
cherishing personality, shall lose it: but he who surrenders it shall
gain the fullness of life eternal, not in the future, but in the
present made one with eternity. Resurrection in the fullness of life,
forgetful of all individual happiness.--Oh! perfect restoration!
Such glorification of feeling and inhibition of thought is nowhere
better indicated than in the following passage from _The Possessed_
which complements the one I read a few moments since:
“‘You seem to be very happy, Kirillov,’ said Stavrogin.
“‘Yes, very happy,’ he answered, as though making the most ordinary
reply.
“‘But you were distressed so lately, angry with Liputin?’
“‘H’m!... I’m not scolding now, I didn’t know then I was happy. Have
you seen a leaf, a leaf from a tree?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘I saw one lately, a little green. It was decayed at the edges. It was
blown by the wind. When I was ten years old I used to shut my eyes in
the winter on purpose and fancy a green leaf, bright, with veins on
it, and the sun shining. I used to open my eyes and not believe them,
because it was very nice, and I used to shut them again.’
“‘What’s that? An allegory?’
“‘N-no.... Why? I’m not speaking of an allegory, but of a leaf, only a
leaf. The leaf is good: everything’s good.’
“‘When did you find out you were so happy?’
“‘Last week, on Tuesday--no, Wednesday, for it was Wednesday by that
time, in the night.’
“‘By what reasoning?’
“‘I don’t remember. I was walking about the room ... never mind. I
stopped my clock. It was thirty-seven minutes past two.’”[100]
But, you may well contend, if feeling is to overcome thought, and the
soul know no state but this vague expectancy susceptible to every
outside influence, what can result except complete anarchy? It has been
said, and of late more frequently, that anarchy is the consummation of
Dostoevsky’s doctrine. A discussion of his beliefs would lead us into a
far country, for I can anticipate the storm of protest I should provoke
if I dared affirm that Dostoevsky does not plunge us into anarchy,
but simply and naturally leads us to the Gospels. On this point we
must be clear. Christian doctrine as contained in the New Testament is
usually seen by people of our nation through the medium of the Roman
Catholic Church, as she has modified it, moreover, in harmony with her
own needs. Now, Dostoevsky abhors all churches, the Church of Rome in
particular. He claims it his right to accept Christ’s teaching directly
from the Scriptures, and from them alone, which is precisely what the
Catholic cannot possibly concede.
In his letters we come across countless passages inveighing against
the Roman Catholic Church, accusations so vehement and so categorical
that I dare not repeat them to you here. But they confirm the general
impression I gather at each fresh reading of Dostoevsky and help me to
a better understanding of him. I know no author at once more Christian
and less Catholic in spirit.
“But you have put your finger on the very crux of the question,” Roman
Catholics will say, “and you have yourself explained it, many and many
a time, seemingly with full understanding. The Gospels, the words of
our Lord Jesus Christ, considered apart, lead but to anarchy, whence
the need for St. Paul, for the Church, for Catholicism as a whole....”
I shall not attempt to argue with them.
Dostoevsky leads us, we may take it, if not to anarchy, to a sort of
Buddhism, or at least _quietism_, and we shall see that in the judgment
of the orthodox, this is not his only heresy. He draws us far away from
Rome--the Rome of the Encyclicals, I mean--far, too, from worldly codes
of honour.
“But look here, Prince, are you a man of honour?” cries one of his
characters to Prince Myshkin, the hero who best embodied his philosophy
until the day when he wrote _The Karamazovs_ and presented to us
these angelic creatures, Alyosha and Father Zossima. What then does
Dostoevsky exalt as his ideal? The life contemplative? A life wherein
man, renouncing reason and will, shall know love alone?
Perhaps Dostoevsky would find personal happiness in such an existence,
but certainly not man’s higher destiny. As soon as Prince Myshkin,
far from his native land, reaches the higher plane, he is urgently
impelled to turn his steps homeward, and when young Alyosha confides
to Father Zossima his secret aspirations towards ending his days in
the monastery, his confessor says to him: “Go hence from this house,
thou wilt be of greater use out in the world! Thy brothers have need of
thee!”... “_I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world,
but that thou shouldest keep them from evil._”
I notice (and with this remark I come to treat of the demonic
element in Dostoevsky’s works) that most translations of the Bible
render Jesus’s words “_But deliver them from evil_,” which is not
quite accurate. The translations I mean are Protestant versions.
Protestantism is inclined to leave out of the reckoning angel and
demon alike. By way of experiment I have often asked Protestants
if they believed in the Devil, and invariably my question has been
received with bewilderment. Then I realized that in most cases this
was a question the Protestant had never put to himself. In the end he
replied that he did, of course, believe in evil, and when I pressed
him, he admitted that in evil he discerned only the absence of good,
as in darkness the absence of light. Now, we are here far removed
indeed from the Gospel texts which mention time and again a diabolic
force, real, present, and defined. “_Deliver them from evil?_”... No!
“_Deliver them from the Evil One._” This problem of the Devil occupies,
I may say, an important place in Dostoevsky’s work. Some no doubt will
see in him a Manichean. We are aware that the great heresiarch, Mani,
recognized two principles controlling the universe--the Power of Good
and the Power of Evil, equally active, independent, and indispensable,
by which belief the Manichean doctrine is directly associated with the
teaching of Zarathustra. We observed (and on this point I am bound
to insist) how Dostoevsky assigns the Devil’s habitation, not to the
baser elements in man, but to the very noblest--the realm of intellect,
the seat of reason, although man’s entire being even can become the
Archfiend’s dwelling-place and prey. The most cunning snares laid
for us by the Evil One are, in Dostoevsky’s reckoning, intellectual
temptations and problems. I do not think it will be going far astray
from my subject if I consider first of all the problems expressing
mankind’s torturing obsessions.... What is Man? Whence comes he and
whither does he return? What was he before birth, what becomes of
him after death? To what Truth can mankind attain?--or even more
pertinently--What _is_ Truth?
With Nietzsche a new problem arose, completely different from the
rest, and far from being absorbed amongst these others, it pressed
straight to the forefront. As a problem it, too, has its torturing
uncertainty--an uncertainty that drove Nietzsche to madness. “What can
mankind accomplish? What can one single man accomplish?” The question
implies the terrible apprehension that man could have been other
than he is, could have accomplished--could yet accomplish--greater
things, whereas he is content to take his graceless ease at the first
halting-place without thought of crowning his progress.
Was Nietzsche actually the first to formulate this question? I dare not
affirm that he was, for I am confident he had already come across the
problem amongst the Greeks and amongst the Italians of the Renaissance.
But with the latter the question was answered immediately, and man
turned eagerly to the domain of practical activity. The solution was
sought and found unerringly in action and in the practice of the