Rowan Williams' new book, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, has garnered much praise. Here is an excerpt that I found especially striking:

What Dostoevsky does in Karamazov is not to demonstrate that it is possible to imagine a life so integrated and transparent that the credibility of faith becomes unassailable; it is simply to show that faith moves and adapts, matures and reshapes itself, not by adjusting its doctrinal content (the error of theological liberalism, with which Dostoevsky had no patience) but by the relentless stripping away from faith of egotistical or triumphalistic expectations. The credibility of faith is in its freedom to let itself be judged and to grow. In the nature of the case, there will be no unanswerable demonstrations and no final unimprovable biographical form apart from Christ, who can only be and is only represented in fiction through the oblique reflection of his face in those who are moving toward him.

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is a longtime Commonweal contributor.

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