What Can Dostoevsky Teach Us About Catholicism?
Jul 19, 2024
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In my previous post, I discussed Dostoevsky’s perceptions of Catholicism in the context of his novel The Brothers Karamazov, and specifically The Grand Inquisitor, a story-within-a-story and a chapter in that book.
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SubscribeAs I noted, Dostoevsky suggests that the Catholic Church and its leaders embrace the Devil instead of Christ, promising material security and rules that create moral certainty instead of accepting God’s gift of free will (and its derivatives, freedom of conscience and moral responsibility) . Dostoevsky reserves particular contempt for Jesuits
1, a Catholic religious order of priests, who even Alyosha, the kindest and wisest of the three Karamazov brothers, despises.
Some might say that Dostoevsky’s critique sounds Protestant in nature, but Dostoevsky rejected Protestantism, too—he viewed it as fundamentally void and believed it would eventually collapse.
2Dostoevsky’s religious views are rooted in Russian Orthodoxy—and very emphatically Russian Orthodoxy, not Orthodoxy in general. I will discuss Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodoxy at length in a moment, but first I want to address Dostoevsky’s view of Catholicism in more detail.
Dostoevsky’s view of Catholicism was shaped by the time he spent in a Siberian labor camp as a young man. There, Dostoevsky “observed the machinations of Polish prisoners, many of whom were revolutionaries hoping to throw off the Russian yoke.”
3 Dostoevsky was also disturbed by intra-Catholic loyalty, especially the Polish loyalty to the Jesuits.
4Later, Dostoevsky came to view France as the paradigm of Catholicism—and the best example of its inherent errors. As he argued in his essay “Three Ideas”:
“Catholicism has sought but failed to organize society in the name of Christ; that same France with her revolutionists of the Convention, with her atheists, with her socialists and with her present-day communards,—is, continues to be, in the highest degree, fully and altogether, a Catholic nation, completely contaminated with the spirit and letter of Catholicism.”
5Dostoevsky believed that socialism and Catholicism shared the same core ideas, those expressed by the Grand Inquisitor. To Dostoevsky, both socialism and Catholicism seek to liberate men from the “burden” of their free will and its attendant responsibility, which requires individuals to make the difficult choice to choose God’s will on a daily basis. As John Moran argues,
“At its core, socialism promises a society that allows for the blossoming of human happiness. Once the material conditions of man’s existence are corrected through the elimination of private property, man can be expected to attain his highest state of happiness.”
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