One of the problems with Dostoevsky is that too many readers have read into his novels the ideas they wanted to find there, so that for secular readers he was an early existentialist who argued for an anguished agnosticism, while for many believers he was a kind of Christian apologist. Neither reading does him the courtesy of seeing that he was above all a novelist—a believer (...)
November 30, 1999
Books
The Novelist as Theologian
DostoevskyLanguage, Faith, and FictionRowan WilliamsBaylor University Press, $24.95, 290 pp.
The remainder of this article is only available to paid subscribers. If you’re not currently a Commonweal subscriber in print or online, an online-only subscription costs just $34 a year. Click here for immediate access.
All love can be painful because to love one thing is to disallow the love for another thing. Thus, all love aims at that which is all encompassing and that can only be God and then to love the other as oneself. But to go from the lesser love to the greater love is most difficult because we are both temporal and eternal and our taste for the termporal is very strong indeed. This is why we have to be compassionate to all human beings- because we often choose the lesser over the greater, the termporal over the eternal. Roskolnikov chooses not so much money as the pursuit of his own rationality over life- it was an identifaction with mind: his. Fortunately, he is brought back from the precipice. Doestoeyevsky was not a believer as much as he was a person trying to see through a glass darkly. I like to think that he finally did. richard borda.