the demonic in dostoevsky

I want to try to spell out some of the ideas that Rowan Williams lays out in his chapter on the demonic in Dostoevsky’s writing. It is really interesting stuff, also is of interest following the Nightline debate of the Devil which I recently was able to watch and discuss with some folks.

I’ll first try to sketch out some general ideas.

The demonic is:

• non-physical
• destructive
• vying for control & the ability to write history
• desires to steal the unique freedom that each person has

“The Devil is the enemy of real narration—that is, narration with an open future, with the possibility of future choices, further events; and he cannot himself give the power to narrate.”

Let me explain how that plays out in the Karamazov story “the Grand Inquisitor”. You have a world that has been altered not to allow freedom to anyone. The argument goes as such, Christ is rather diabolical in that he would require such extraordinary human ability to live up to standard required of Christ. There would only be a very small elite group of people who could be called those all-star Christians. The underlying belief is that Christ is disconnected from the real world, He doesn’t understand what real life is like for the average person. This is why the Inquisitor believes he needs to save the world, he would take on the sin so others wouldn’t need to.

What is also important to this understanding, are the comments which Ivan states just before his story. He doesn’t want to accept that everything will be made right in the end. He believes this means that ultimately everything evil will ultimately called good in the end. This is not something he can accept. He sees God/Christ as not being within the world, but as working from without.

Dostoevsky sees freedom as essential to being human. That is freedom understood in a very existential specific way. It isn’t simply about free-will; but about what freedom makes possible, the creation that it makes possible.  Dostoevsky shows the contrast with love being the creation of narrative. Take away that freedom and expect people to live completely rational lives and you have cut off their humanity, simply creating drones.

The Devil is outside of the physical. He has to work through the physical, though for him to achieve his full plan would mean the complete self-imploding of creation. Or as Rowan Williams says much better:

Diabolical authorship, as we have seen, ends in silence and death. It persists only because it is in dialogue with actual contingency. Thus the Devils’ negations have the effect of pushing forward an uncontrollable history; he cannot perfect his own authorship, because that would mean the dissolution of creation itself.

Much of the work against the Devil becomes the reclaiming of the physical. Much of the struggle with the Devil within Dostoevsky is the attempt to escape the finite physical by trying to escape to the infinite realm of abstractions, that radical disconnection with the body; all for the sake of having more control of the environment.

It is in this light that we understand the corruption of the Inquisitor. He is trying to rewrite history in his image, but in doing so he does violence humanity. There is the violence of some for the sake of the whole, but also the violence to each individual by limiting their freedom; thereby creating perpetual children.

Behind a good deal of the narrative of Karamazov, says Leatherbarrow, lies the theological suspicion that any sort of fiction is a challenge to God’s sole “authorship.”

I will quit here.