Among the works of art that one finds in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland is Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. Painted in 1521, it remains a stark, almost shocking image to this day. The dead, nearly colorless Christ lies in profile with gangrenous wounds visible in his hands, feet, and side. With a tilted head and half-open eyes, his face is turned slightly away from the viewer. The dramatic effect of the painting is heightened by the fact that it is a life-size depiction, stretching across the wall the full length of Christ’s body, but with a height of no more than that of a coffin (200 cm x 30.5 cm). Moreover, the painting is encompassed by a tomb-like border with the traditional inscription that reads, in Latin, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Holbein’s achievement is an austere representation of Holy Saturday, the day on which one cannot evade the fact that Christ died on Good Friday and before one can celebrate his resurrection on Easter morning.
Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Making of the Christian Imagination)
Baylor University Press
285 pages
$59.98
This painting makes a memorable appearance in The Idiot, one of the major works by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the story, Prince Myshkin, an enigmatic Christ-like figure who becomes embroiled in the lives of those he meets upon his return to Russia, encounters a reproduction of the picture in a friend’s home. The painting makes a profound impression upon Myshkin, who goes so far as to suggest that it could destroy a believer’s faith.
According to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who analyzes the author’s life and work in his latest book, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, the painting functions as “a kind of anti-icon, a religious image which is a nonpresence or a presence of the negative.” As Williams explains, in the Orthodox tradition, icons confront the viewer with a direct gaze as worshippers seek to encounter the divine through the icon. Within Orthodox iconography, he states, the only figures ever represented in profile are demons and, sometimes, Judas Iscariot. Thus, it is unsurprising that Myshkin, whose own physical description is “plainly modeled on the traditional Orthodox iconography of the Savior,” would be so shaken by Holbein’s depiction of the lifeless Christ.
As this example demonstrates, for Williams, understanding Dostoevsky’s writing requires understanding the context of the Eastern Orthodox tradition in which he wrote, despite the fact that his religious beliefs remain open to interpretation. Williams undertakes the task of exploring Dostoevsky’s literary imagination primarily by investigating his four major novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov. Many recurring motifs in these mature works—seemingly unmotivated acts of violence; child abuse; absent fathers; the clash of cultures; the question of national identity—clearly make Dostoevsky’s writing relevant today. Yet one must also recognize, Williams argues, that the world his characters inhabit and in which they move is “extensively and deeply shaped by motifs in Orthodox Christianity.”
Williams believes that Dostoevsky’s work is not, as it is often interpreted, ultimately about the tension between believing or not believing in the existence of God. Rather than presenting arguments for or against God’s existence, Dostoevsky presents the reader with a variety of fictional characters and their changing views—including some of his own, though never in a straightforward manner—thereby demonstrating his concern “as a writer to show what belief and unbelief are like rather than either to conclude an argument or to take refuge in the unfathomables of subjectivity.” Here Williams acknowledges the influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who argued that Dostoevsky’s work is “polyphonic” in nature, containing a multitude of voices interacting with one another. Williams thus brings his insights to bear upon many of the characters and incidents within Dostoevsky’s writing, including Ivan Karamazov’s well-known parable of the Grand Inquisitor, the insight into the murderous mind of Raskolnikov, and the aforementioned Myshkin.
This book is the first in a new series from Baylor University Press, The Making of the Christian Imagination. Introducing the series, Williams states that “no system of perceiving and receiving the world can fail to depend upon imagination.” With that in mind, the series seeks to explore some of the most creative minds that have been informed by a distinctively Christian imagination and have subsequently contributed to the formation of contemporary culture. It is fitting that Dostoevsky is the focus of the first book in this series, for his writing has deeply influenced both literary imagination and the Christian faith. Williams’ examination of the extent to which Dostoevsky’s Orthodox context informed his work is thus a welcome contribution to both literary and theological studies.
Moreover, it is fitting that Williams, whose academic career has included teaching posts at Cambridge and Oxford, would offer the first book in this series, for he has demonstrated an abiding interest in the relationship between Christian faith and the arts. One of his earlier works, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love, which features his Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge from 2005, reflects his interest in understanding the process of artistic composition from a theological perspective. More specifically, Williams considers how the aesthetic of French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain informed the work of artists, especially two Catholic artists: David Jones, the Welsh poet and painter; and Flannery O’Connor, the American fiction-writer. In this earlier study, Williams refers to Dostoevsky, stating that his writing demonstrates a kind of obedience in which the artist “struggles to let the logic of what is there display itself in the particular concrete matter being worked with.” For example, concerning the complex character of Myshkin, he notes how Dostoevsky presents an ambiguous “Christ figure” who is “a tragic hero in a sense that prevents him being a simple icon of Christ.”
Williams’ reflections on Dostoevsky come to full fruition in his most recent study. Among the themes that emerge from his analysis is the relation between faith and fiction. In this regard, Williams points to the well-known, yet puzzling statement made by Dostoevsky in 1854, just after his release from prison camp, in which he claimed that “if someone were to prove to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it was really the case that the truth lay outside Christ, then I should choose to stay with Christ rather than with the truth.” According to Williams, Dostoevsky is not making an antirealist or irrational confession of faith in the face of a world without meaning. Rather, he is expressing the notion that the truth of faith is not reducible to observable fact, such that fiction can seek to create something that is “closer to the truth God intends than any kind of factual reporting.” Thus, both faith and fiction are “gratuitous linguistic practices” in which there remains an element of incompleteness.
Another theme developed extensively by Williams is the centrality of freedom to Dostoevsky’s work. Whereas the Devil is portrayed as the enemy of freedom and “the enemy of real narration—that is, narration with an open future”—freedom is considered to be essential to human existence. For Dostoevsky, Williams argues, freedom means the possibility of choice, and indispensable to that freedom is language. Thus, allowing for the freedom of another person entails giving space for another voice, a kind of “decentering” of the self that parallels the self-emptying of kenotic Christologies within Orthodox theology.
Finally, Williams considers Dostoevsky’s related emphasis upon the theme of responsibility for others. According to Williams, Dostoevsky’s fiction manages to avoid sentimentalism while still showing the form of love that is directed to a specific person through the interrelated concepts of responsibility, compassion, and caring for others. Although the precise nature of Dostoevsky’s relationship with traditional Orthodoxy remains unclear, this notion of responsibility is “almost unimaginable without the theological underpinning of a model of corporate life” like that of the church. For example, the notion of “taking responsibility for all,” a phrase used repeatedly by Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, is illustrated by Dostoevsky in his depiction of the popular practice among Orthodox Christians of exchanging crosses that are worn around the neck as a sign of friendship. Moreover, this commitment to the material world, Williams contends, parallels the “thoroughgoing sacramental theology” of the Orthodox Church, which insists “on the indwelling of divine activity in matter.”
By considering the context of Eastern Orthodoxy in which Dostoevsky wrote, Williams enables the reader to look more perceptively into the depictions that emerge from Dostoevsky’s literary and religious imagination. While Dostoevsky’s writing does not offer the direct gaze of the Orthodox icon, neither does it mime the askance view of Holbein’s dead Christ. Instead, it is “a sort of icon,” a genuinely searching and demanding literature that is deeply indebted to the Christian faith.
David McNutt is an adjunct professor at Wheaton College and a PhD candidate in theology and the arts at the University of Cambridge, England.
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