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Concluding Notes
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121 As we have seen, in Dostoevsky’s dialectics, sin plays the role of a prime mover, for the writer is concerned with the dynamic nature of transgression. Akin to a microscopic virus—emerging, spreading, mutating, causing pandemics— sin is dangerous because of its ability for expansion and growth. According to Dostoevsky, a tiny sin is capable of infecting and destroying the whole planet. For this very reason, one is responsible for all. We recall that having corrupted the Golden Age planet the Ridiculous Man confesses: “Like a horrible trichina, like the germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so did I infect with myself all that happy earth that knew no sin before me” (280). In a Siberian hospital, Raskolnikov has a nightmare of another pandemic—the world is affected by a terrible pestilence spreading from Asia: “Everyone was to perish, except for certain, very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men’s bodies” (547). Contaminated by this virus, people lose their ability to tell good from evil. The idea that a tiny microorganism has the potential to cause global catastrophes is part of Dostoevsky’s moral philosophy. The connection between Dostoevsky’s dialectics and the problem of sin has yet another dimension. For centuries, Western theology and philosophy has seen Adam’s Fall as the most macabre event in biblical history, which resulted in God’s curse of the earth, Eve’s painful childbirth, and Adam ’s mortality. Characteristically, Robert Burton opens his seminal treatise Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) with a discussion of original sin, claiming that it transformed man into a miserable being haunted by fear and despair. In his monumental study of the Western guilt culture of the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries, the modern French historian Jean Delumeau approaches this idea from a similar perspective: “Christian civilization placed the Fall at the center of its preoccupations and construed it as a catastrophe initiating all history.”1 “For an entire civilization, Original Sin had become a sort of deus ex machina,” he maintains, “constantly used as the final and definitive reason for all that goes bad in the universe.”2 Even Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Michelangelo, he claims, “most often felt fragile and sinful, Concluding Notes Concluding Notes 122 susceptible to melancholy, and anguished by the rapid decline of an aging, decrepit world.”3 Delumeau further argues that the emphasis on the original sin, dominating Western culture for many centuries, in fact represents a divergence from the early Church tradition, specifically from Saint Paul’s doctrine of sin: In any case, the result was a type of preaching that spoke more of the Passion of the Savior than of His Resurrection, more of sin than of pardon, of the Judge than of the Father, of Hell than of Paradise. There was thus a true deviation from Saint Paul’s tidings that “where sin abounded grace did much more abound” (Rom. 5:20). Hence one might consider whether the rejection of an oppressive doctrinal campaign was one of the causes of the “deChristianization ” of the West.4 To borrow Delumeau’s phrasing, Dostoevsky, like Saint Paul, “speaks a language of hope.”5 In his dialectics, he follows the early Church tradition, demonstrating that sin and grace both abound on earth, putting an emphasis on the coming of the second Adam—Christ’s redemption of sins. It is important to stress that unlike Western theology, Christian Orthodox thought does not operate with the notion of the original sin. It does not teach that man shares guilt for the Fall of Adam. Rather, as a result of this event, man is born into a fallen world and therefore becomes susceptible to sinning. Dostoevsky takes this argument a step further. He seems to suggest that the consequences of Adam’s fall were twofold. The Fall resulted in man’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, but at the same time, tasting of the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge opened his eyes, put into focus the world’s dual nature, highlighted the proximity of good and evil, sin and grace, thus stimulating man’s conscience, strengthening his awareness , and allowing him the dignity of free choice. A neo-Orthodox thinker, Dostoevsky presents the idea of world’s fallen-ness not as the cursed and desperate condition of man subjected to sickness and death but as a dialectical experience of the world’s vibrant oppositions. In this world, polarities flow into each other. Though...