Books in Brief: Dostoyevsky and the Catholic Church

Dostoyevsky and the Catholic Church, by Denis Dirscherl, SJ (Loyola University, 177 pp., $12.95)

Denis Dirscherl’s brief study of one facet in the world view of Fyodor Dostoyevsky will satisfy the curiosity of readers who may have wondered whether the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov actually reflected the great Russian novelist’s view of the Catholic Church, or merely that of the sinister Ivan Karamazov. The suspicion in which Moscow, the Third Rome, held its Western counterpart was many hundreds of years old when Dostoyevsky was born. Nurtured by anti-Roman grievances transmitted from Byzantium, Russian ill-will toward Catholicism had been further ingrained by incessant struggles with Catholic Poland and by the emergence of Uniate Catholicism in Russia’s borderlands. In the mid nineteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church, although humbled by its subordination to Czardom, began to receive the reverent respect of an influential group of literary men, who valued its traditionalism in contrast to Western rationalism. Dostoyevsky was not part of this original group —he was undergoing a purgation of early socialistic views in a Siberian prison. But after he emerged, he began vigorously to champion Orthodoxy, with its emphasis on mysticism and on suffering, and he singled out the pious Russian peasant as the sole true practitioner of Christianity in a degraded world. And who were Christianity’s chief antagonists? In his Diary and elsewhere he points an accusing finger at the Catholic Church and at socialism, which he saw as pursuing the same destructive ends: robbing man of his spiritual freedom and forcing him to submit to cold authority, which is too jealous of its prerogatives to allow Christ’s love to shine through. Especially fearsome were the Jesuits, and the supposed implications of papal infallibility, which caused consternation in so many quarters in 1870. Late in his life, Dostoyevsky befriended another, much younger genius, with whom he spent some time at the famous Optina Pustyn monastery new Moscow. The younger man was Vladimir Solovyov, and it seems, to an admirer of Dostoyevsky, a pity that this encounter with one of the outstanding ecumenical spirits of the nineteenth century could not have taken place earlier in his literary career.

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Dostoyevsky and the Catholic Church, by Denis Dirscherl, SJ (Loyola University, 177 pp., $12.95)

Denis Dirscherl’s brief study of one facet in the world view of Fyodor Dostoyevsky will satisfy the curiosity of readers who may have wondered whether the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov actually reflected the great Russian novelist’s view of the Catholic Church, or merely that of the sinister Ivan Karamazov. The suspicion in which Moscow, the Third Rome, held its Western counterpart was many hundreds of years old when Dostoyevsky was born. Nurtured by anti-Roman grievances transmitted from Byzantium, Russian ill-will toward Catholicism had been further ingrained by incessant struggles with Catholic Poland and by the emergence of Uniate Catholicism in Russia’s borderlands. In the mid nineteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church, although humbled by its subordination to Czardom, began to receive the reverent respect of an influential group of literary men, who valued its traditionalism in contrast to Western rationalism. Dostoyevsky was not part of this original group —he was undergoing a purgation of early socialistic views in a Siberian prison. But after he emerged, he began vigorously to champion Orthodoxy, with its emphasis on mysticism and on suffering, and he singled out the pious Russian peasant as the sole true practitioner of Christianity in a degraded world. And who were Christianity’s chief antagonists? In his Diary and elsewhere he points an accusing finger at the Catholic Church and at socialism, which he saw as pursuing the same destructive ends: robbing man of his spiritual freedom and forcing him to submit to cold authority, which is too jealous of its prerogatives to allow Christ’s love to shine through. Especially fearsome were the Jesuits, and the supposed implications of papal infallibility, which caused consternation in so many quarters in 1870. Late in his life, Dostoyevsky befriended another, much younger genius, with whom he spent some time at the famous Optina Pustyn monastery new Moscow. The younger man was Vladimir Solovyov, and it seems, to an admirer of Dostoyevsky, a pity that this encounter with one of the outstanding ecumenical spirits of the nineteenth century could not have taken place earlier in his literary career.