by Jeff Love
“I am foul, not holy. I would not sit in an armchair, I would not desire to be worshipped like an idol!” Father Ferapont thundered: “Now people are destroying the holy faith. The deceased, your saint here,” he turned to the crowd, pointing at the coffin with his finger, “denied devils. He gave purgatives against devils. So they’ve bred like spiders in the corners. And on this day he got himself stunk. In this we see a great sign from God.”32
Father Ferapont uses his authority as a great faster and keeper of silence to mock Zosima and his message of social harmony as the true import of the Christian project. One could just as easily argue that Zosima’s insistence that we are guilty before and for all suggests that we make each other into idols and have a responsibility for the whole that encroaches, however subtly, on God’s authority. Father Ferapont reaffirms the significance of individual salvation as primary against the salvation of all in a community of equals—we are slaves to God, not to men.
VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL ERŌS
The distinction one finds in Notes from Underground undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis in The Brothers Karamazov, for the active man becomes a new kind of hero in The Brothers Karamazov, based on a notion of action whose end is radically different from that pursued by Dostoevsky’s heroes of will. The latter strive to attain an ideal that by its very nature leads beyond the human world, refusing to accept its imperfections in a pursuit that manifests the tensions we noted in the Platonic challenge. The attempt to achieve perfection, the ideal of beauty, ends up in the wholesale rejection of all that is imperfect, ugly, unnecessary—it is a call to eliminate finite life and, in this sense, it is a murderous, destructive call. In The Brothers Karamazov, in contrast, the ideal is incarnated in the other—one strives to redeem one’s guilt toward the other, to perfect oneself by recognizing one’s indissoluble debt to the other, what Zosima, in a significant passage, calls “active love,” whereby one may truly become convinced of “the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.”33 Moreover, this notion of action as project leads one away from the vitiating indecision of the underground man and Stavrogin—one becomes God not by engaging in a necessarily impossible imitation of divine freedom, understood first and foremost as being free of the need to act, but by acting to bring about a perfect community where action will no longer require decisions, where action will become “second nature,” and all the bitter questions of self-consciousness will resolve themselves in a finally finished compact in which all citizens will accept themselves in the other and the other in themselves. Theory and practice, reason and will, come together in a final synthesis.
Still, one cannot easily forget the underground man’s declaration that man both strives for and fears the end of that striving, this latter fear emerging in the destructive rebellion against reason or whatever notion of authority declares that something is the case. To quote the grand inquisitor: “Man was made a rebel, can rebels be happy?”34 How, then, might we reconcile these statements suggesting the primacy of will with the turn to reconciliation in an ostensibly or potentially final synthesis? Is a final synthesis impossible? Is finality or “peace” as such impossible? Or is the only finality the finality of unending struggle, the finality in which will acts to disturb whatever harmony or balance may have been achieved?
There can be little doubt that the underground man’s insistence on the primacy of will, not as the expression of agency that impels us to complete or perfect ourselves but as what ensures that completion or perfection cannot arise, is remarkable. The Platonic mytheme of erōs toward beauty seems to be countered by a different erōs toward the interruption of beauty, toward destruction, the ugly, the disharmonious—in a word, toward deviation for its own sake.
The possibility of these two diametrically opposed erōtes affords us quite a different interpretation of Dostoevsky’s heroes of will. For them, we might say, the ideal is simply a pretext or excuse, a form of camouflage for the undiminished exercise of will to counter the possibility of any order. From this perspective, Raskolnikov and Kirillov are heroes of will in a different and perhaps purer sense, since the residue of sense that seems to attach to their expressions of discontent is merely that: a residue, or even a simulacrum. As the narrator remarks in the chapter that introduces Father Ferapont: “For those who renounce Christianity and rebel against it are in their essence of the same image of the same Christ, and such they remain, for until now neither their wisdom nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create another, higher image of man and his dignity than the image shown of old by Christ. And whatever their attempts, the results have been only monstrosities.”35
If we return to the notion of strains or lacerations, we may come to identify two radically different kinds of heroes: those who seek to heal the wound and those who seek to keep it open, who live from the wound that they have no desire to heal—rather, they continue to prick it. But this is not masochism in any ordinary sense. Quite the reverse; this is a declaration of vitality as the capacity to suffer, to go against the common accord, to sow discord as the proper way of being human. Man is violence! Long live the underground!
If we take this view seriously, the hesitations of the underground man emerge as acts of will, as results of a decision not to obey, rather than an inability to decide. Indeed, this inability to decide is merely the propaganda of self-pity. The underground man celebrates his imperfection in a way that is utterly opposed to the Platonic model. He is a monster maliciously aware of his monstrosity. He is a Silenus, like Socrates, who hides a more fundamental will to destruction under the guise of a constructive doctrine of self-perfection, whose vitiating irony is of course the obvious, if unspoken, connection between perfection and death.
The divine madness of Plato that seeks freedom from the confusions of our life in this world, from the many indignities and necessities to which we are subject as long as we are beings in this world, finds its opposed mirror image in the hero of will. The core of the hero of will is not the desire to found the New Jerusalem, nor is it the desire to become a god beyond all human restrictions. Rather, the hero of will is a pure rebel, one who seeks to mock and undermine the creation. He is the most aggressive madman or criminal of all, because the hero of will has no other intent but to negate whatever is taken to be authoritative at any given time. The hero of will is the critic who goes beyond words to action—the one who negates but does not necessarily bring about good in doing so.36 The powerful question that arises is whether this hero of will, focused on personal salvation, on striving to be one with God, on becoming a god vis-à-vis the world and all others, is not the most dangerous and violent of all criminals. The contrast to this remarkable personality is the hero of self-sacrifice and kenotic release, the social hero whose most heroic act is not the highest self-affirmation but its exact opposite: the highest self-abnegation, in something akin to the realization of a responsibility to and for the other, for all.
3
GODMEN
A purely human universe is inconceivable because without nature man is nothingness, pure and simple.
—Alexandre Kojève
What is left of madness after Fyodor Dostoevsky? The striving to be like a god or to become God cannot seem to escape its association with crime, the most violent and wholesale rejection of our servitude to others and to nature. Emancipation so understood is essentially asocial and cannot succeed as a social project because all such projects involve restriction, a rootedness in servitude that is not peripheral or accidental but of the very essence of the social compact. The conflict between reason and will emerges in this context as a conflict between the individual and society, between the “vertical” eros of metaphysical emancipation and the “horizontal” eros of social emancipation, the latter being little more than a form of enslavement, or “bad conscience,” as Friedrich Nietzsche put it so eloquently in Towards a Genealogy of Morality.1
In the wake of Dostoevsky, two remarkable attempts to effect reconciliation between reason and
will in their various avatars emerge in Russia, generating in no small degree the foundation for the religious renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At stake in both is the rescue of the concept of deification from the Dostoevskian polemic, not as a concept authorizing the most extreme emancipation from the social compact but indeed as the necessary condition of emancipation as a social project. Rather than affirming the lonely strivings of social outcasts, misfits, and criminals, the rogues’ gallery for which Dostoevsky is both celebrated and pilloried, these attempts affirm a much more extreme project of universal deification or of deification as relating to all, not just to the lonely few, a project whose precondition is the emancipation of, and not from, all.
The two central figures here are Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Fedorov. Soloviev is considered the most important Russian philosopher. His concept of the Godman (богочеловек) is an attempt to effect the reconciliation of reason and will in favor of reason. Fedorov is an altogether more unusual figure, whose thought evokes astonishment and disbelief, for he argued that the only task of humanity, the only genuinely human task, is to overcome death, not only by saving all those who are alive but also by resurrecting all those who have ever lived.
Soloviev and Fedorov agree that deification is the proper end of history—that history ends once human beings have become divine. In this respect, they both reject the tension one finds in Dostoevsky regarding finality. Yet they come at finality in wildly diverging ways. Fedorov is quite obviously the more radical of the two. He holds that metaphysical emancipation is the only condition of possibility of emancipation. Any form of emancipation short of complete emancipation from the imperative to physical self-preservation, the fons et origo of sin and fear, is necessarily vitiated by its lack of completeness. Soloviev maintains a more moderate position according to which it is possible to become one with the deity by subordinating one’s will to the deity’s; by learning the proper lessons of subordination, one liberates oneself from the miseries of death.
VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV: LECTURES ON DIVINE HUMANITY
Soloviev’s most influential and concentrated exposition of his notion of deification may be found in the famous Lectures on Divine Humanity (Чтения о богочелoвечестве), which he gave to a large audience in Saint Petersburg in 1877–1878.2 These lectures offer a remarkable synthesis of theology and philosophy, as their title promises, as well as of elements in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and those of the Western intellectual tradition. In both senses, one might claim that Soloviev’s lectures present a model for what Kojève was to do with G. W. F. Hegel some fifty years later in Paris. This layer of repetition should not be ignored, since Kojève carries on a polemic with Soloviev that is implicit in the Hegel lectures, though explicit elsewhere in Kojève’s writings on Soloviev.3 Hence, one may regard the Hegel lectures as a response to two masters as well as two different orientations to the singular question of what deification may entail.
Soloviev was a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century Russian thought, both the creator of the first truly comprehensive Russian religious philosophy and one of the principal inspirations behind the Russian religious revival of the so-called silver age of Russian literature, which ended with the revolution. He was born in 1853, in Moscow. His father was a prominent Russian historian. Soloviev attended Moscow University in 1869, first in the physics and mathematical faculty, then in the faculty of history and philology. He was an extraordinary student with very broad interests but an absorbing concern with theological issues. He attended the Moscow Theological Academy for a year after leaving the university, but he ended up studying philosophy at the University of Saint Petersburg, where he wrote his first book, The Crisis of Western Philosophy (Against the Positivists), in 1874. He took a position at Moscow University but went to England on a yearlong grant to study gnosticism and mystical theology. He had the first of his famous visions of wisdom or “Sophia” at the British Museum. He returned to Russia in 1876 and produced a second book, The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge. He resigned his post at Moscow University and became involved in the Pan-Slavic fervor of the Russian war with Turkey, in 1877. He delivered a speech in 1877 whose content is characteristic. Paul Valliere gives a fine summary:
His thesis was as simple as it was bold. The world is dominated by two opposed, but equally flawed, religious principles: the Islamic or oriental principle of “the inhuman God,” a formula justifying universal servitude, and the modern European principle of “the godless human individual,” a formula validating “universal egoism and anarchy.” The conflict between these principles can only end in a vicious circle. Fortunately for humanity there is a country, Russia, where East and West meet and transcend their spiritual division in a higher religious principle: bogochelovechestvo, the humanity of God. As history’s “third force,” Russia is destined to blaze the path not just to Constantinople but to the universal, divine-human cultural synthesis of the future.4
It is a short step from this lecture to the series of lectures on divine humanity that we examine below. At roughly the same time, Soloviev produced another significant work, The Critique of Abstract Principles, published in 1880. During the last twenty years of his life, Soloviev engaged in an astonishing variety of activities journalistic, artistic (he is a significant poet), and of course philosophical. He wrote three important works: The Meaning of Love (1894), The Justification of the Good (1897), and Three Dialogues on War, Progress, and the End of History, with a Brief Tale of the Antichrist (1899). He died in 1900.
Soloviev’s twelve lectures on divine humanity cover an immense range of thought about the proper end of human life, reprising that most traditional of philosophical questions—What is the good life?—in a distinctively modern context in which, with the rise of positivism, the question appears to have lost much of its force.5 Characteristically, Soloviev opens his lectures with a plea to return not to philosophy but to religion or to a religious attitude to the world that more properly considers what for Soloviev is the crucial issue: the connection of the ostensibly contingent existence of “humanity and the world with the absolute principle and focus of all that exists.”6 The plain task of the lectures is to determine the nature of this connection and the consequences for action which follow from that determination. In this sense, the lectures are expressly political, though by couching their task in the language and conventions of religious discourse, Soloviev is able to mute the political implications of his conclusions.7
Before delving into the lectures, I should like to provide a guiding summary of their basic points. By doing so, I hope to make my subsequent discussions of the lectures clearer. Soloviev can be very pointed in his formulations, but he also covers so many issues in the lectures that they can tend to be diffuse at times as well.
Soloviev’s central point is an apparently simple one: the striving proper to humanity is to assume the divine identity, to reflect maximally the divinity as the absolute in the contingent and relative circumstances of our everyday existence in the world.8 We attain to divinity, becoming Godmen to the extent of our success in imitating the divinity, in a world that by definition does not allow for complete imitation. Every particular life is particular, though it may try maximally to express the whole or the universal in its particularity. And, to be sure, this is the final purpose of the striving to be truly human in Soloviev, for the most truly human being is the one who has most effectively made herself absolute, that has dedicated herself to the assumption of divine absoluteness or universality.
Soloviev’s interpretation is remarkably—and no doubt self-consciously—triadic. One such triad identifies Plato with Augustine and, finally and more generally, with German idealism as the most modern avatar of the fundamental Platonic model and that which brings out most fully the implications of the Platonic model. German idealism is Platonic-Christian thought coming to its fullest and thus most self-conscious expression. The common element in all three is the ide
ntification of divinity with the absolute as necessarily idealist, as proposing a task that may be fulfilled only by the most radical incarnation of the absolute in each human being. Soloviev, as the emphasis on religion suggests, is not after personal salvation but the salvation of humanity as a whole, and nothing less than this total salvation can make a claim to that term.
The emphasis on salvation for all offers a response to the heroes of negation in Dostoevsky. It is also an attempt to explore the ostensibly positive aspects of Dostoevsky’s fiction by giving philosophical depth to the seemingly exiguous claims for brotherhood, made most memorably in Zosima’s speech in The Brothers Karamazov, where Zosima exhorts his listeners to bow down in guilt before each other. While I do not wish to linger on this point, it is interesting to note that Soloviev’s turn to the great traditions of discourse about being, whether pagan or Christian, seems itself to betray Dostoevsky’s emphasis on mythic representation. Zosima is very much an attempt to represent a good life to be followed or cherished as an example for action that leaves behind the endless talk of the underground man.
THE NEGATIVE ABSOLUTE
Soloviev’s text is concerned, from the very beginning, with the negative, with the hero of negation or the human being understood primarily in the negative. If we recall the underground man’s concern with the infinite, as leading from one determination to another to yet another and so on, Soloviev’s account of the absolute in the second lecture makes abundant sense: “Absoluteness, like the similar concept of infinity, has two meanings, one negative and one positive. Negative absoluteness, which undoubtedly belongs to the human person, consists in the ability to transcend every finite, limited content, not to be limited by it, not to be satisfied with it, but to demand something greater. In the words of a poet, it consists in the ability ‘to seek raptures for which there is no name or measure.’ ”9