Dostoevsky portrait circa 1872. Photo: By Vasily Perov.
Witness to truth: Dostoevsky and George Fox had something in common, says Jonathan Wooding
‘They were both seeking to re-discover an authentic source of religious authority.’
When Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist responsible for Crime and Punishment, wrote about ‘truth’, he meant, rather confusingly, something like ‘the political and ecclesiastical reality of nineteenth century Europe’, and not the truth that, say, early Quakers (Friends of Truth) were seeking and proclaiming. He wrote in a letter of 1854: ‘If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.’ This version of Christ, one can be fairly confident in saying, however, is reminiscent of ‘the inward Light’ or ‘the Seed’, offered up by George Fox. Both Dostoevsky and Fox were seeking to re-discover an authentic source of religious authority – a new religiosity. Both, it seems, were hard-pressed to distinguish themselves from the revolutionaries and ranters on the one side, and the royalists and theocrats on the other.
The protagonist of the 1869 novel The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, for instance, denounces ‘a faith which is unchristian’ during an outrageous and scandalous episode at a sedate gathering; and whereas today’s Quaker may wish to divest herself of the ‘Christian’ trappings of faithful practice, here Myshkin means that the reigning faith has been corrupted. He is calling out religious authoritarianism, much as those antinomian early Friends did. Myshkin has become something of a guru for many friends to religious identity: when Iris Murdoch was writing her great rebuke to scientism and literalism, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she regularly returned to this drama of the holy fool. Holiness is a concept worth defending.
It would appear that Quakers themselves were on a sticky wicket in pre-revolutionary Russia. ‘In 1779, the Ecclesiastical Dictionary listed “Quakers” as “nothing else but crowds of deranged people and enthusiasts who are possessed”’, Wikipedia tells us. This alleged, or apparent, Pentecostalism is a problem, it would appear, if you are writing a novel with the title, The Possessed (or, The Devils, or just, Demons). When there seems to be no tradition of non-conformism or heterodoxy in Russia, it may not be easily distinguished from the derangements of cruel populists and devilish anarchists. The Possessed is a scandalous novel, too, deeply shocking on many levels. Murder, suicide, rape and cruelty dominate the narrative, alongside a portrait of genteel indifference, liberal passivity and orthodox banality. Ironically, Vladimir Lenin himself was so disturbed by the pitilessness of Dostoevsky’s revolutionary terrorists that he couldn’t bring himself to go on reading. According to Orlando Figes in A People’s Tragedy he called it ‘a piece of reactionary filth… I have absolutely no desire to waste my time on it’. What might be troubling Lenin’s conscience?
Well, maybe it starts here: ‘A mist of fine, drizzling rain enveloped the whole country, swallowing up every ray of light, every gleam of colour, and transforming everything into one smoky, leaden, indistinguishable mass. It had long been daylight, yet it seemed as though it were still night. And suddenly in this cold mist there appeared coming towards them a strange and absurd figure.’
We can all imagine this figure as George Fox, persistent itinerant, vagrant and pilgrim, pursuing his obscure mission across a turbulent seventeenth-century Britain. Is he bringing news? What’s caused him to wander so far afield? Can he be trusted?
This is not George Fox, however, but one Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, decent man, something of a failure, professional glories long past, and his reputation as a liberal reformist become something of a joke. This could happen to anyone, couldn’t it? Well, certainly it has for this Guardian-reading, penniless pursuer of lost causes, and perhaps, too, for many another Friend. Verkhovensky’s efforts to educate the next generation in responsible scepticism and, let’s say, affirmative heterodoxy, appear to have failed: his son Peter is an Hitlerian cynic, and his one-time ward, the darkly charismatic Stavrogin, bears ‘the marks of a false Messiah’ (as George Steiner writes in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky).
‘At one time it was reported about the town’, declares the novel’s narrator, ‘that our little circle was a hotbed of nihilism, profligacy, and godlessness… And yet we did nothing but indulge in the most harmless, agreeable, typically Russian, light-hearted liberal chatter.’ Dostoevsky is no doubt recoiling here, via his rather innocuous narrator, from both the rational nihilists and extremists, and from the well-meaning liberals. But what, in Russia of the day, did he then have to turn to, when enthusiasts and mystics of every type were conveniently vilified by the theocracy under which he lived – and non-conformism? Well, as I say, I’m not sure it’s ever really caught on there.
‘Holiness is a concept worth defending.’
Stepan Verkhovensky has a track record for theological pontifications and a patronising attitude to those of simple or fearful faith: ‘I believe in God, [but] I believe in him as a Being who is conscious of himself in me only. You can’t possibly expect me to believe as my Nastasya [his maidservant] believes, or like some gentleman who believes “just in case”’. But Verkhovensky’s own final hours are very moving: ‘“My friends,” he said, “God is necessary to me, if only because He is the only being whom one can love eternally.”’ His words carry an authentic ring, finally, of devotional truth: ‘“If I have once loved Him and rejoiced in my love, is it possible that He should extinguish me and my joy and bring me to nothingness again?”’ Like any good liberal he has previously followed and partially embraced the progressive thinking of his age, but like Dostoevsky himself with ‘his life-long polemic against the “crystal palace” of socialism’ (George Steiner again), he finally stands with ‘Christ’ as against the ‘truth’ of worldly power and manipulation, convention and coercion.
That is the message we may glean, too, from the ‘poem’ written by the character Ivan in Dostoevsky’s final novel The Brothers Karamazov, the novel which Leo Tolstoy carried with him at the end of his life, and long passages of which the young philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the trenches of the first world war, could recite by heart. In the poem, a ‘Grand Inquisitor’ traduces Christ’s offer of freedom and friendship with God, with what appears to us now a totalitarian, ‘brave new world’ of material satisfaction, cultural distraction and authoritarian rule. We imagine Christ there, as a prisoner of this old man who has lost all semblance of holiness, apparently bullied into submission and acquiescence: ‘The old man longed for Him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all His answer.’ Note that ‘Christ’, powerless, is in the silence. And, as George Fox would recognise, he potently upholds, as tyrants never do, ‘the virtue of that life and power which takes away the occasion of all wars’. The scandal of holiness, we might say.
