Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Author's Preface
- ESSAY I Dostoevsky's Journey of Religious Discovery: A Biographical Introduction
- ESSAY II An Introduction to Current Debate
- ESSAY III Remodelling Religious Consciousness in Dostoevsky's Fiction: The Death and Resurrection of Orthodoxy
- ESSAY IV Dostoevsky's Deconstructive Anxiety
- ESSAY V Religious Polemic in Narrative Form: The Brothers Karamazov
- ESSAY VI Conclusion
- Endnotes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
ESSAY IV - Dostoevsky's Deconstructive Anxiety
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Author's Preface
- ESSAY I Dostoevsky's Journey of Religious Discovery: A Biographical Introduction
- ESSAY II An Introduction to Current Debate
- ESSAY III Remodelling Religious Consciousness in Dostoevsky's Fiction: The Death and Resurrection of Orthodoxy
- ESSAY IV Dostoevsky's Deconstructive Anxiety
- ESSAY V Religious Polemic in Narrative Form: The Brothers Karamazov
- ESSAY VI Conclusion
- Endnotes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A Perilous Threshold
In his contribution to Pattison and Thompson's recent book, Henry Russell cautions the reader:
Lest apophatic knowledge be misunderstood […] for its mute stepbrother deconstruction, it is important to note that human inability to refer with full truth to God is a result of God's perfection which we, as sinful creatures, cannot know. Language about God refers then to a plenitude, which it cannot contain, not to an absence.163
In drawing attention to this vital distinction Russell, perhaps unintentionally, highlights the ease with which one may be confused with and slip into the other, not only conceptually but also, depending on the mood of the experiencing subject, experientially. In other words, the silence at the core of apophatic religion may be interpreted or experienced either as a fullness or as an absence, as glorious plenitude or as desolate abyss, as a Godcentred locus of meaning or as total chaos and meaninglessness. As we have seen, Dostoevsky experienced this himself and understood the slippage very well. Similar experiences may be observed in the experience of his individual characters, and also among them. As Thompson points out,164 characters as unlike each other as Myshkin and Ippolit quote the same phrase from the Book of Revelation, ‘there will be time no more’ (Rev 10: 6), the one in his epileptic ecstasy, the other in suicidal despair. This dual experience is not a modern discovery.
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- Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience , pp. 71 - 102Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2005