Dostoevsky's Religion (review)

Dostoevsky’s Religion by Steven Cassedy argues that when asking the question “what did Dostoevsky believe?” we ought not to look for a coherent set of doctrines or definable beliefs. To begin with, if we look at his writings (even his articles, when he is speaking in his “own” voice rather than through fictionalized characters), his ideas contradict one another so that it is difficult to determine what he believed. Cassedy therefore maintains it is more important to understand what role religion played in his writings and what he does with the topic of religion. Second, we are prisoners of inherited interpretations, but few of these interpreters asked what educated Russians of his generation knew and believed, and what Russian Orthodoxy meant to his contemporaries. The book emphasizes that Dostoevsky explores the nature of belief itself, and that is more important than identifiable beliefs he had—and since he was often torn between opposing beliefs, he viewed belief itself as paradoxical or characterized by antinomies.

Cassedy begins by examining the interpretive tradition of Dostoevsky’s religion and concludes that most Western scholars and biographers did not look into the specificities of Dostoevsky’s own religious tradition (namely, Russian Orthodoxy). For those that have, they depended on a tradition of Russian scholars whose interpretation of Orthodoxy was in fact profoundly shaped by Dostoevsky himself. In particular, George Fedotov, inspired by Dostoevsky, took the elements of voluntary suffering and humility and argued that this kenoticism was essential to Russian Orthodox spirituality throughout history. In short, Cassedy argues that it is necessary to understand Dostoevsky’s intellectual milieu and what Russian Orthodoxy meant to him and his contemporaries to conclude what he inherited from or shared with this religious tradition and what was his own peculiar outlook.

Cassedy proceeds by analyzing the development of ideas about religion in Europe and Russia from the end of the eighteenth until the middle of the nineteenth century, which constitutes the intellectual environment of Dostoevsky’s time. The general tendency in Europe, from Kant to Renan, was to humanize religion and the divine. Although some Russians (the “Westernizers”) followed this path, the Slavophiles took a romantic-nationalist approach which held that Orthodoxy preserved Christianity in its purest form (and therefore also had universal implications). Turning to Dostoevsky, Cassedy shows how various characters speak in terms of the debates of the day (if often in popularized form), but finds that the ideas of religious nationalism expressed by Shatov in The Devils are “quite similar” to those expressed by Dostoevsky himself in his Diary of a Writer. In the latter, Dostoevsky makes claims about the essentially Christian nature of the Russian folk and, in turn, their messianic mission to bring true Christianity to the rest of humanity. In The Devils, Shatov argues not only that the Russian people are the only God-bearing people on earth, but that “God is the synthetic personality of the entire people”—in short, that God is a “Russian God” (28). Conflating the views of the two, Cassedy argues that Dostoevsky contradicts himself by claiming simultaneously a Russian national God and a universal one.

Although Dostoevsky makes Slavophile-style claims of the Russians as the chosen people, in other places he criticizes the Slavophiles. Cassedy argues that Dostoevsky frequently contradicts himself, and not simply over time (as though his convictions changed during the course of his life), but within relatively short periods of time or even in the same article or letter. By exploring certain issues such as anti-Semitism and Slavophilism in Dostoevsky’s articles and letters (i.e. when he is speaking in his “own” voice), Cassedy shows Dostoevsky’s inconsistencies. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Bakhtin, he concludes from this that, in Dostoevsky, belief is always “contextual,” words and ideas are always expressed in dialog. Like Kantian antinomies, convictions are often expressed in opposing pairs in Dostoevsky’s fiction; these antinomies pit faith against reason and are ultimately irresolvable. As a result, it is difficult to identify any particular set of beliefs as Dostoevsky’s...