I've seen those, too. Among Catholics, they are the ones who have a thing about Freemasons - or, sometimes, Gnostics. Among Prods, Jack T.Chick fans. Or the people who stand at street corners with a scrawled placard, yelling. I don't know what good they think they're doing. I've had a lot of rows myself one way or another,but it never occurred to me to do something so stupid as - to say one thing I feel strongly about - start reading anti-Israel blogs just to find things to criticize. That won't change anyone's mind, and it will make my own days less pleasant. My only point is that the type described by Dostoyevsky exists, and that it is the type he is likeliest to have met as an outspoken Orthodox.
One thing you may have missed is the fact that the famous Grand Inquisitor scene is in effect a violent anti-Catholic polemic in which Dostoyevsky the Orthodox in effect picks up and runs with common Protestant talking points. It certainly is not a polemic against his own Church, of which he gives a glowing portrait in the figure of Zossima. But it is rooted in Dostoyevsky's own ideological history, which is what gives to all those debates their urgency and seriousness. Dostoyevsky started out as a Russian apostle of nineteenth-century Liberalism, of the kind that saw itself as having a Protestant descent - whether or not bar-sinister - and was innately hostile to the Catholic Church as an authoritarian, backward conspiracy. Those are the charges brought by Dostoyevsky against the Grand Inquisitor. They are not even typical Orthodox talking points against the Catholics: the Orthodox would be likelier to accuse Catholicism of over-rationalizing the Faith and of talking themselves into heresy. They are absolutely liberal and protestant, and show that even as Dostoyevsky had consciously turned back to the Russian church, he had taken a whole lot of unresolved liberal and protestantizing issues with him. In my view, this has much to do with the intensity and length of his debates. You seem to me to have implied that Dostoyevsky's faith was a kind of firm point of comfort and confidence in his mind (if I got you wrong, I apologize); to me, it seems the very point to which all the conflicts and the unresolved contradictions converge.
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Date: 2011-03-01 05:19 pm (UTC)One thing you may have missed is the fact that the famous Grand Inquisitor scene is in effect a violent anti-Catholic polemic in which Dostoyevsky the Orthodox in effect picks up and runs with common Protestant talking points. It certainly is not a polemic against his own Church, of which he gives a glowing portrait in the figure of Zossima. But it is rooted in Dostoyevsky's own ideological history, which is what gives to all those debates their urgency and seriousness. Dostoyevsky started out as a Russian apostle of nineteenth-century Liberalism, of the kind that saw itself as having a Protestant descent - whether or not bar-sinister - and was innately hostile to the Catholic Church as an authoritarian, backward conspiracy. Those are the charges brought by Dostoyevsky against the Grand Inquisitor. They are not even typical Orthodox talking points against the Catholics: the Orthodox would be likelier to accuse Catholicism of over-rationalizing the Faith and of talking themselves into heresy. They are absolutely liberal and protestant, and show that even as Dostoyevsky had consciously turned back to the Russian church, he had taken a whole lot of unresolved liberal and protestantizing issues with him. In my view, this has much to do with the intensity and length of his debates. You seem to me to have implied that Dostoyevsky's faith was a kind of firm point of comfort and confidence in his mind (if I got you wrong, I apologize); to me, it seems the very point to which all the conflicts and the unresolved contradictions converge.