He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.
But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.
These are the closing lines from the epilogue in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Many readers and scholars criticize the inartistic and contrived qualities of the epilogue claiming it does little more than neatly tie up thematic loose ends and set the stage for Raskolnikov's eventual moral regeneration.
Though I can understand criticism of the epilogue from the point of view of narrative form, I can't help but feel that those who read the culminating portion of Crime and Punishment from purely literary and aesthetic perspectives have basically missed the whole point of Dostoevsky's transgression and redemption narrative.
At its most fundamental level, Crime and Punishment is a story of birth, death, and rebirth. Raskolnikov commits himself to murder in order to prove that he belongs to the race of higher men - men who exist beyond the confines of good and evil; men who are not only free to but also obliged to do away with the restrictive bonds of old religious-based morality and pioneer a new morality of the superman. This, in essence, is Raskolnikov's transgression. As he embraces the cold faith of secular humanistic logic and reason, he abandons God and suffers spiritual death.
And what would the world look like if it were run by those who, like Raskolnikov, had abandoned God and embraced the cold faith of secular humanistic logic and reason? I believe this question tickled the back of Dostoevsky's mind as he wrote Crime and Punishment, for it seems his overall intention was not to simply illustrate the devastating effect the abandonment of God could have on one man, but rather the devastating effect such an abandonment could have on civilization.
Raskolnikov's spiritual death writ large and the world that would result from it. A turning away from God's Loving Creation and the willful embracing of the nightmare world of predator and prey. Dostoevsky could see the writing on the wall as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Much of his work is an attempt to make his contemporaries see it as well. But the vast majority of his contemporaries disregarded Dostoevsky's prescient spiritual warnings and instead barreled headlong in a murderous and de-spiritualized twentieth century.
The cryptic nature of most apocalyptic prophecies requires intense symbolic interpretation, but even those detailed dissections of the various predictions made by various prophets of doom leave traces of dissatisfaction and doubt in the mind. Can one ever truly be sure what the plagues referred to in these prophecies truly mean or what the mystical four-headed dragons really represent? Dostoevsky does not veil his prophecies in obscure chimerical motifs. Unlike Nostradamus, Dostoevsky is a prophet of doom with a zoom lens - he understands that any understanding of catastrophe at the macro level invariably springs from a catastrophe at the micro level; and for Dostoevsky, the root of any microcosmic cataclysm was invariable individual and spiritual.
It is Easter 2020, and I imagine many readers are wondering why I am babbling on about Crime and Punishment and Dostoevsky and prophecy on this day of all days. That's a good question. All I can tell you is this - when I woke up this morning, I was reminded of a passage from the epilogue of Crime and Punishment; and as I recalled the passage, I was suddenly struck by how eerily similar our current situation has become to Raskolnikov's prison hospital dreams. I urge you to read the following passage carefully (please do not skip over it! - paragraph segmentation added by me):
He was in the hospital from the middle of Lent till after Easter. When he was better, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish and delirious. He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen.
Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.
Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other.
The alarm bell was ringing all day long in the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was summoning them no one knew. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because everyone proposed his own ideas, his own improvements, and they could not agree. The land too was abandoned. Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction.
The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.
As in Raskolnikov's delirious Lenten and Easter dreams, a plague grips our contemporary world this Easter. This epidemic appears to have a real, physical, microbial element to it, but as in Raskolnikov's dreams this material infestation represents but the surface of a deeper and more deadly spiritual sickness.
Our world has become the Raskolinokian nightmare world of mad and furious men convinced they are in possession of the truth - never have men been so assured of their scientific conclusions; never have they been more satisfied by their own moral convictions; never have they been so persuaded of their own infallibility. Yet this conviction of infallibility is based entirely on the ultimate transgression - a hubristic and sinful belief in their own high-mindedness through the willful and intentional abandonment of God.
Just as Raskolnikov sought to prove his superiority through murder, our contemporary Raskolnikovs seek to prove their superiority through evil. They seek to prove their excellence the same way Raskolnikov aimed to prove his - by demonstrating transgressions simply do no exist - that man is free to compose his own ideas of good and evil and is, consequently, not only free, but also duty-bound to impose these ideas upon society. Raskolnikov's ultimate sin is the sin against God's Loving Creation - the ultimate sin of our civilization truly is Raskolnikov's sin writ large.
It is no coincidence that the story of Lazarus plays a central role in Raskolnikov's eventual moral and spiritual redemption, and it is in the epilogue that this redemption comes to fruition. When Sonya reads the story of Lazarus to Raskolnikov, she makes it expressly clear that confession is key to his redemption. But confessing to the crime is not enough; in addition to repentance, Raskolnikov must open himself to the truth of the Gospels - to open himself to the possibility of rebirth through the conscious decision to accept the light and love of Christ as the only way to leave the sin of spiritual death toward which his misguided logic eventually led him.
And what were all, all the agonies of the past! Everything, even his crime, his sentence and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external, strange fact with which he had no concern. But he could not think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have analysed anything consciously; he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.
Under his pillow lay the New Testament. He took it up mechanically. The book belonged to Sonia; it was the one from which she had read the raising of Lazarus to him. At first he was afraid that she would worry him about religion, would talk about the gospel and pester him with books. But to his great surprise she had not once approached the subject and had not even offered him the Testament. He had asked her for it himself not long before his illness and she brought him the book without a word. Till now he had not opened it.
He did not open it now, but one thought passed through his mind: “Can her convictions not be mine now? Her feelings, her aspirations at least….”
Raskolnikov opens himself up to the possibility of spiritual rebirth through a shift in thinking - through the conscious abandonment of theory and the acceptance of faith and love. He knows Sonya believes on Jesus, and he understands that her convictions and aspirations can become his. All he has to do is decide and commit. In essence, Raskolnikov begins to understand the words Jesus expresses to Martha in the Gospel of John:
25 Jesus said onto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
26 And whosever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believst thou this?
For me, these words not only encapsulate the meaning of Easter, but the essence of Christianity. This opens up the possibility demonstrated, once again, by the closing lines of the epilogue in Crime and Punishment:
the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life.
The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is the beginning of that new story; of that gradual renewal and regeneration of man. But the renewal and regeneration can only occur if we believe in Jesus; if we believe on Jesus; if we wholeheartedly believe in the promise He demonstrated and offers to us all.
If we believe in Christ and the Resurrection, we will pass from one world into another and begin our initiation into a new unknown life. If we refuse to believe in Christ, if we knowingly and willfully turn our backs on the promise Christ offers, we will remain trapped in the nightmare world of theory; a world in which we cannot become Creators but will diminished into being nothing but destroyers.
As was the case with Raskolnikov, the high-minded pretexts and justifications we assign to our destructive activities will not be able to mask the inherent evil motivation driving these activities. Of course, without a sense of moral conscience grounded in the Reality of God, this inherent evil is rarely recognized. Raskolnikov is unable to maintain his high-minded theory when it is pitted against his innate understanding of good and evil and the reality of God. But the playing out of this battle in the microcosm of Raskolnikov had no effect on the eventual social, spiritual, and historical developments at the macroscopic level. Unlike Raskolnikov, twentieth-century man experienced no crisis of conscience over his transgressions. Yes, he was punished for his crimes, but unlike Raskolnikov, this punishment has not yet translated into any form of genuine repentance.
Without genuine repentance, our world remains stuck in God-less theory - a God-less theory that is antithetical to Creation. Destruction is its only logical motivation and and its only logical outcome as demonstrated by the lies and deceits spurring our own contemporary plague.
A world stuck in God-less theory cannot be reborn because it does not believe, but the option remains open to individuals within the God-less theory world, as Raskolnikov's delirious Lenten dreams indicate:
The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.
That Raskolnikov dreams his visions during Lent and into Easter is not accidental. The link Dostoevsky draws here is both clear and commanding. The theory world of infallible convictions is incapable of renewal as long as it remains fixed to its evil and sinful pact. There is no Lazarus at the macrolevel; then, as now, Lazarus exists only at the microlevel, but he can only be reborn, can only renew, can only escape the claws of destruction and death through belief.
Above all else, our task this Easter is to formulate the right answer to the question Jesus poses to Martha before he raises Lazarus in the Fourth Gospel:
And whosever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?
Belief comes first, but it should also be supported by living in Christ. Our belief in Jesus should inspire a life in Jesus, especially this Easter as the spiritual and material plague infecting our world continues to spread and consume everything in sight.
If we believe, we can be renewed like Raskolnikov or reborn like Lazarus.
If we believe, we too will be able to come forth and share in the glory of God.
I wish all my readers a happy and joyous Easter.
Note added: Raskolnikov needed to endure great suffering to atone for his sins, but this does not imply that all genuine repentance involves the same level of suffering.
But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.
These are the closing lines from the epilogue in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Many readers and scholars criticize the inartistic and contrived qualities of the epilogue claiming it does little more than neatly tie up thematic loose ends and set the stage for Raskolnikov's eventual moral regeneration.
Though I can understand criticism of the epilogue from the point of view of narrative form, I can't help but feel that those who read the culminating portion of Crime and Punishment from purely literary and aesthetic perspectives have basically missed the whole point of Dostoevsky's transgression and redemption narrative.
At its most fundamental level, Crime and Punishment is a story of birth, death, and rebirth. Raskolnikov commits himself to murder in order to prove that he belongs to the race of higher men - men who exist beyond the confines of good and evil; men who are not only free to but also obliged to do away with the restrictive bonds of old religious-based morality and pioneer a new morality of the superman. This, in essence, is Raskolnikov's transgression. As he embraces the cold faith of secular humanistic logic and reason, he abandons God and suffers spiritual death.
And what would the world look like if it were run by those who, like Raskolnikov, had abandoned God and embraced the cold faith of secular humanistic logic and reason? I believe this question tickled the back of Dostoevsky's mind as he wrote Crime and Punishment, for it seems his overall intention was not to simply illustrate the devastating effect the abandonment of God could have on one man, but rather the devastating effect such an abandonment could have on civilization.
Raskolnikov's spiritual death writ large and the world that would result from it. A turning away from God's Loving Creation and the willful embracing of the nightmare world of predator and prey. Dostoevsky could see the writing on the wall as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Much of his work is an attempt to make his contemporaries see it as well. But the vast majority of his contemporaries disregarded Dostoevsky's prescient spiritual warnings and instead barreled headlong in a murderous and de-spiritualized twentieth century.
The cryptic nature of most apocalyptic prophecies requires intense symbolic interpretation, but even those detailed dissections of the various predictions made by various prophets of doom leave traces of dissatisfaction and doubt in the mind. Can one ever truly be sure what the plagues referred to in these prophecies truly mean or what the mystical four-headed dragons really represent? Dostoevsky does not veil his prophecies in obscure chimerical motifs. Unlike Nostradamus, Dostoevsky is a prophet of doom with a zoom lens - he understands that any understanding of catastrophe at the macro level invariably springs from a catastrophe at the micro level; and for Dostoevsky, the root of any microcosmic cataclysm was invariable individual and spiritual.
It is Easter 2020, and I imagine many readers are wondering why I am babbling on about Crime and Punishment and Dostoevsky and prophecy on this day of all days. That's a good question. All I can tell you is this - when I woke up this morning, I was reminded of a passage from the epilogue of Crime and Punishment; and as I recalled the passage, I was suddenly struck by how eerily similar our current situation has become to Raskolnikov's prison hospital dreams. I urge you to read the following passage carefully (please do not skip over it! - paragraph segmentation added by me):
He was in the hospital from the middle of Lent till after Easter. When he was better, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish and delirious. He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen.
Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.
Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other.
The alarm bell was ringing all day long in the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was summoning them no one knew. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because everyone proposed his own ideas, his own improvements, and they could not agree. The land too was abandoned. Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction.
The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.
As in Raskolnikov's delirious Lenten and Easter dreams, a plague grips our contemporary world this Easter. This epidemic appears to have a real, physical, microbial element to it, but as in Raskolnikov's dreams this material infestation represents but the surface of a deeper and more deadly spiritual sickness.
Our world has become the Raskolinokian nightmare world of mad and furious men convinced they are in possession of the truth - never have men been so assured of their scientific conclusions; never have they been more satisfied by their own moral convictions; never have they been so persuaded of their own infallibility. Yet this conviction of infallibility is based entirely on the ultimate transgression - a hubristic and sinful belief in their own high-mindedness through the willful and intentional abandonment of God.
Just as Raskolnikov sought to prove his superiority through murder, our contemporary Raskolnikovs seek to prove their superiority through evil. They seek to prove their excellence the same way Raskolnikov aimed to prove his - by demonstrating transgressions simply do no exist - that man is free to compose his own ideas of good and evil and is, consequently, not only free, but also duty-bound to impose these ideas upon society. Raskolnikov's ultimate sin is the sin against God's Loving Creation - the ultimate sin of our civilization truly is Raskolnikov's sin writ large.
It is no coincidence that the story of Lazarus plays a central role in Raskolnikov's eventual moral and spiritual redemption, and it is in the epilogue that this redemption comes to fruition. When Sonya reads the story of Lazarus to Raskolnikov, she makes it expressly clear that confession is key to his redemption. But confessing to the crime is not enough; in addition to repentance, Raskolnikov must open himself to the truth of the Gospels - to open himself to the possibility of rebirth through the conscious decision to accept the light and love of Christ as the only way to leave the sin of spiritual death toward which his misguided logic eventually led him.
And what were all, all the agonies of the past! Everything, even his crime, his sentence and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external, strange fact with which he had no concern. But he could not think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have analysed anything consciously; he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.
Under his pillow lay the New Testament. He took it up mechanically. The book belonged to Sonia; it was the one from which she had read the raising of Lazarus to him. At first he was afraid that she would worry him about religion, would talk about the gospel and pester him with books. But to his great surprise she had not once approached the subject and had not even offered him the Testament. He had asked her for it himself not long before his illness and she brought him the book without a word. Till now he had not opened it.
He did not open it now, but one thought passed through his mind: “Can her convictions not be mine now? Her feelings, her aspirations at least….”
Raskolnikov opens himself up to the possibility of spiritual rebirth through a shift in thinking - through the conscious abandonment of theory and the acceptance of faith and love. He knows Sonya believes on Jesus, and he understands that her convictions and aspirations can become his. All he has to do is decide and commit. In essence, Raskolnikov begins to understand the words Jesus expresses to Martha in the Gospel of John:
25 Jesus said onto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
26 And whosever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believst thou this?
For me, these words not only encapsulate the meaning of Easter, but the essence of Christianity. This opens up the possibility demonstrated, once again, by the closing lines of the epilogue in Crime and Punishment:
the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life.
The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is the beginning of that new story; of that gradual renewal and regeneration of man. But the renewal and regeneration can only occur if we believe in Jesus; if we believe on Jesus; if we wholeheartedly believe in the promise He demonstrated and offers to us all.
If we believe in Christ and the Resurrection, we will pass from one world into another and begin our initiation into a new unknown life. If we refuse to believe in Christ, if we knowingly and willfully turn our backs on the promise Christ offers, we will remain trapped in the nightmare world of theory; a world in which we cannot become Creators but will diminished into being nothing but destroyers.
As was the case with Raskolnikov, the high-minded pretexts and justifications we assign to our destructive activities will not be able to mask the inherent evil motivation driving these activities. Of course, without a sense of moral conscience grounded in the Reality of God, this inherent evil is rarely recognized. Raskolnikov is unable to maintain his high-minded theory when it is pitted against his innate understanding of good and evil and the reality of God. But the playing out of this battle in the microcosm of Raskolnikov had no effect on the eventual social, spiritual, and historical developments at the macroscopic level. Unlike Raskolnikov, twentieth-century man experienced no crisis of conscience over his transgressions. Yes, he was punished for his crimes, but unlike Raskolnikov, this punishment has not yet translated into any form of genuine repentance.
Without genuine repentance, our world remains stuck in God-less theory - a God-less theory that is antithetical to Creation. Destruction is its only logical motivation and and its only logical outcome as demonstrated by the lies and deceits spurring our own contemporary plague.
A world stuck in God-less theory cannot be reborn because it does not believe, but the option remains open to individuals within the God-less theory world, as Raskolnikov's delirious Lenten dreams indicate:
The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.
That Raskolnikov dreams his visions during Lent and into Easter is not accidental. The link Dostoevsky draws here is both clear and commanding. The theory world of infallible convictions is incapable of renewal as long as it remains fixed to its evil and sinful pact. There is no Lazarus at the macrolevel; then, as now, Lazarus exists only at the microlevel, but he can only be reborn, can only renew, can only escape the claws of destruction and death through belief.
Above all else, our task this Easter is to formulate the right answer to the question Jesus poses to Martha before he raises Lazarus in the Fourth Gospel:
And whosever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?
Belief comes first, but it should also be supported by living in Christ. Our belief in Jesus should inspire a life in Jesus, especially this Easter as the spiritual and material plague infecting our world continues to spread and consume everything in sight.
If we believe, we can be renewed like Raskolnikov or reborn like Lazarus.
If we believe, we too will be able to come forth and share in the glory of God.
I wish all my readers a happy and joyous Easter.
Note added: Raskolnikov needed to endure great suffering to atone for his sins, but this does not imply that all genuine repentance involves the same level of suffering.
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