Dostoevsky by Nikolai Berdyayev

First published: 1934

Type of work: Critical study

Critical Evaluation:

Nikolay Berdyayev, one of the foremost religious thinkers of modern Russia, pays homage in MIROSOZERTZANIE DOSTOIEVSKAGO (original English title: THE WORLD-OUTLOOK OF DOSTOIEVSKY) to the major influence upon his unique interpretation of Jesus Christ and the role of Christianity in the twentieth century. While his critical study throws considerable light on Dostoevsky’s philosophy, it admittedly reveals Berdyayev’s own religious and ethical concerns to such an extent that critic and subject are inseparable. In the first part of his analysis Berdyayev, beginning with a portrait of the Russian mind, discusses Dostoevsky’s conceptions of man, freedom, evil, and love. In the second, he turns more to the implications of these conceptions in terms of modern Russia, politics, and especially their most complete statement, THE GRAND INQUISITOR, the famous chapter from THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. Altogether, the critical study provides a significant key for the understanding of Berdyayev’s remarkable intellectual career as well as for Dostoevsky’s works.

Asserting that he thinks Dostoevsky Russia’s greatest metaphysician, Berdyayev wants to unfold the dynamic ideas that he calls Dostoevsky’s conception of the world. The Russian mind, he claims as a basis of his study, is an antagonistic dualism, in which the natural tendency is to seek such extremes that the individual is sharply torn by mutually exclusive positions. The “nihilists” avidly seek anarchy, atheism, and self-destruction; the “apocalypsists” want only the most excessive ascetism and a messianic revival. These two sides of the Russian spirit are more fully expressed in Dostoevsky’s fiction than in any other philosophy or literature; they create the passion that makes his novels so disturbing. This passion is the tragic view of human destiny, a view that he was able to communicate because he fully expressed the dualism that he found in himself and also because he saw life in depth, never on the surface. By holding the dualism that he found in himself and also because he saw life in depth, never on the surface, and by keeping the dualism always in its greatest tension, he created the true human spirit as it faces tragedy, undergoes purification through suffering, and finds release in Christ.

Although opposed to Humanism, Dostoevsky’s absorbing theme was man and man’s destiny; this theme was developed in such an intense manner that the inability of Humanism to solve the tragedy of human destiny is completely undermined. All of his novels are built around a single character who is the center of a whirlpool of passions that drive him away from a social framework; once the character completely alienates himself, he believes that he is emancipated from law and from God. But this “freedom” is the condition through which Dostoevsky plunges into the inner depths of man. According to the Humanistic view of the modern world, this alienated character should be free, but Dostoevsky shows that his freedom is really a descent into Hell, for the character develops an unhealthy self-love that makes him introspective and consequently miserable. Human nature, being extreme, antinomian, and irrational, is overwhelmingly attracted toward lawless freedom, and this lawlessness can end only in the deification of man or the discovery of God. In other words, freedom is a test that leads either to misery or to release; it is the essential condition of tragic suffering.

The justification both of God and of man rests in human freedom; thus, all of Dostoevsky’s novels are concerned with the experiment of human liberty. Freedom is an amoral, valueless state out of which the dignity or debasement of man grows, but freedom, being amoral, implies the freedom of evil and the freedom of good, either of which will destroy the other. Thus freedom is essentially tragic, for once it is found, it presents the free man with choices that are beyond his power. Since freedom implies such a choice, Berdyayev believes that it is by nature Christian and that the figure of Christ presents itself as the ultimate and final freedom. The experience of complete freedom, embracing both good and evil, can lead to God, but more often it ends in self-will that cancels freedom by negating God and becoming trapped in compulsion. In fact, the usual mind advocates a freedom that negates evil, and without evil there would be no need for God because the world itself would be divine.

Wherever there is freedom, there must be evil; to reject freedom on the basis that it can bring evil is to make the evil twice as bad. Thus, while freedom can degenerate into evil, goodness cannot exist without it. Dostoevsky here saw clearly into the depths of human nature: evil rests in the depths of man’s own personality—it is the sign of his inner profundity and the key to true personality, not a condition caused by society. In other words, evil is the inevitable tragic road that a man must travel before he can discover himself or God; the truly free man learns that evil will defeat and destroy itself and that through this purgation he can rise to spiritual adulthood. Thus, evil is an essential step in the spiritual process: Dostoevsky’s heroes go through freedom and evil to redemption. In the state of freedom, the hero believes that everything is allowable; however, he becomes obsessed by some fixed idea, and with this obsession freedom becomes tyranny. He appears to be a maniac. But all things are not allowable, because men, having been created in the image of God, have an absolute value that the hero cannot violate without violating himself and becoming a slave. Yet if man were not completely free, he could do anything and be responsible for nothing; thus the state of freedom turns the hero into a divided man, able to become either a devil or a saint.

In Dostoevsky’s treatment of love, Berdyayev sees the full depth of the novelist’s profundity. Love is a Dionysian force that literally tears the individual to pieces. Woman is the dark principle that draws man toward a tragic sensuality or an equally tragic pity; there is no unity or perfection in his treatment of love. Instead it is a power that infects and destroys. Yet the blame rests entirely with the man; he is powerless before the female; she brings out the tragic separation of his own nature. In sexual as well as in social love, man’s inner nature yearns for an excess that enslaves him; even pity takes on a violence that is self-destructive. The only kind of love that remains real is Christan love, an affirmation of eternity; all other love is an illusion and a lie.

Having outlined Dostoevsky’s conception of human destiny, Berdyayev turns to the larger issues that grow out of this central vision; these issues—revolution, socialism, and modern Russia—place the heroes’ struggles in significant frameworks that shape and are shaped by them. Of all of the Russian novelists, Dostoevsky saw clearest that revolution was inevitable; the very nature of the Russian mind dictated the excessive cry for freedom that led to socialism. Socialism, however, wants to displace God and fills itself with messianic spirit; it attempts to create a utopianism that denies evil and hence God. Thus freedom leads to slavery; man loses freedom by asking for too much lawlessness and comes under an unhuman force. In fact, Dostoevsky saw that the only way to end the conditions of nineteenth century Russia was through the Church—to find the freedom of brotherhood in Christ. But before that era, the Russian people must tread the path of evil, of humiliation and despair, that will purge them of their utopianism and allow a national redemption.

In THE GRAND INQUISITOR, Berdyayev finds Dostoevsky’s greatest statement of his religious views—the untangling of the problem of human freedom. Only two choices are available to man, the alternative of Jesus Christ or that of the Inquisitor; there is no third. Christ, who is silent throughout most of the chapter, offers the true freedom of the spirit; the Inquisitor confronts Him with compulsion, recognizing that people cannot bear the freedom offered by Christ. In one sense, the Inquisitor denies God in the name of man, but he also denies man because he believes that man can be happy only as a slave. What he overlooks is that Christ can be seen only through a free act of faith. Thus the deification of man ends in hopeless misery; Christ offers to the few a love that lifts man from self-destruction, but the freedom of Christ comes only through the renunciation of all claims to earthly power.

In portraying Dostoevsky’s philosophy, Berdyayev thus shows that the novelist created a violent and contradictory world in order to describe what he regards as the basic Christian message. The movement through freedom and evil to redemption is to Berdyayev the fundamental theme of Dostoevsky’s works and the philosophy that makes him great.