Faith, Epilepsy and Meaning in The Idiot and Beyond

My favorite parts of Dostoevsky’s novels are those that deal with faith and meaning – the relationship between Raskolnikov and Sonia, especially the Lazarus parts, of Crime and Punishment; the dialecticals between Alyosha and Ivan, Father Zosima and Father Paissy in The Brothers Karamazov; the expository and narrative parts of Notes from Underground – essentially, I’m attracted to all the possibilities for redemption, for affirmations of meaningfulness.

That’s why a couple of chapters in The Idiot were so enjoyable for me. For context, the prince has returned to Petersburg from Moscow and is debating whether or not to go to Pavlovsk to visit Nastasya Fillipovna, the Epanchins and/or Lebedev. He stops at Rogozhin’s, where Rogozhin asks him if he believes in God.

The prince tells Rogozhin two anecdotes from his experience in Moscow. The first is the story of a peasant who killed his friend for a watch, who “went up to hi cautiously from behind, took aim, raised his eyes to heaven, crossed himself and, after praying bitterly to himself: ‘Lord, forgive me for Christ’s sake!’ – killed his friend with one blow, like a sheep, and took his watch.” (220)

The second is more resonant for the prince.

The next morning I went out for a stroll about town…and I saw a drunken soldier
staggering along the wooden sidewalk, all in tatters. He comes up to me: ‘Buy a silver cross, master. I’m asking only twenty kopecks. It’s silver!’ I see a cross in his hand – he must have just taken it off – on a worn light blue ribbon, only it’s a real tin one, you could see it at first glance, big, eight-pointed, of the full Byzantine design. I took out twenty kopecks, gave them to him, and put the cross on at once – and I could see by his face how pleased he was to have duped the foolish gentleman, and he went to drink up his cross, there’s no doubt of that. Just then, brother, I was under the strongest impression of all that had flooded over me in Russia; before I understood nothing of it, as if I’d grown up a dumb brute, and I had somehow fantastic memories of it during those five years I spent abroad. So I went along and thought: no, I’ll wait before condemning this Christ-seller. God knows what’s locked away in these drunken and weak hearts. An hour later, going back to my hotel, I ran into a peasant woman with a nursing baby. She was a young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old. And the baby smiled at her, as far as she’d noticed, for the first time since it was born. I saw her suddenly cross herself very, very piously. ‘What is it, young woman?’ I say. (I was asking questions all the time then.) ‘It’s just that a mother rejoices,’ she says, ‘when she notices her baby’s first smile, the same as God rejoices each time he looks down from heaven and sees a sinner standing before him and praying with all his heart.’ (220)

And then the prince follows with a generalization that resonates with me, particularly in today’s culture where any public discussion involving religion is bound to be tied to politics and exploited for the sake of attacking a conservative or liberal agenda.

…The woman said that to me, in almost those words, and it was such a deep, such a subtle and truly religious thought, a thought that all at once expressed the whole essence of Christianity, that is, the whole idea of God as our own father, and that God rejoices over man as a father over his own child – the main thought of Christ! A simple peasant woman! True, she’s a mother…and, who knows, maybe this woman was that soldier’s wife. Listen, Parfyon, you asked me earlier, here is my answer: the essence of religious feeling doesn’t fit in with any reasoning, with any crimes and trespasses, or with any atheisms; there’s something else here that’s not that, and it will eternally be not that; there’s something in it that atheisms will eternally glance off, and the will be talking not about that. But the main thing is that once can observe it sooner and more clearly in a Russian heart, and that is my conclusion! That is one of the first convictions I’ve formed about our Russia. (221)

From here, Rogozhin will trade crosses with the prince, signifying their brotherhood, a way to set up a parallel between the two peasants perhaps, as Rogozhin will shortly try to kill the prince with a knife, and will be stopped only by the prince’s epilepsy. The prince, meanwhile, will go from his discourse in Rogozhin’s house on this particularly Russian apprehension of God and religious feeling to a wandering around Petersburg in which he is perfectly attuned to all the details of his journey without the slightest effort at consciousness. This exalted state is a presentiment of the fit he will have when he reaches Pavlovsk:

He fell to thinking, among other things, about his epileptic condition, that there was a stage in it just before the fit itself (if the fit occurred while he was awake), when suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul, the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, and all his life’s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. the sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as
if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquility, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause. But these moments, these glimpses were still only a presentiment of that ultimate second (never more than second) from which the fit itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable. Reflecting on that moment afterwards, in a healthy state, he had often said to himself that all those flashes and glimpses of a higher self-sense and self-awareness, and therefore of the “highest being,” were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal
state, and if so, then this was not the highest being at all but, on the contrary, should be counted as the very lowest. And yet he finally arrived at an extremely paradoxical conclusion: “So what if it is an illness?” he finally decided. “Who cares that it’s an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?” (225-6)

Sounds like an articulate argument for taking drugs, though I’m not sure if the high of drugs is evaluated the same way “in a healthy state,” particularly if you account for the idea of drugs being for many an escape from something. There’s a bit of a difference between self-medication and transcendence. Perhaps this fits in with the idea of my previous post about the presence of biography in fiction, but Dostoevsky the epileptic has the prince connect with Mohammed’s epilepsy on the next page:

“Probably,” he had added, smiling, “it’s the same second in which the jug of water overturned by the epileptic Muhammed did not have time to spill, while he had time during the same second to survey all the dwellings of Allah.” (227)

Finally, the prince’s reflections take us back to Nastasya Fillipovna and the difference between his love for her and Rogozhin’s. It is the comparison of degrees, exponentially increased when thought about, between passion and compassion. While there must be an overlapping of the two for a flame of love to burn, there is a point at which passion peters out unless it is fanned by compassion.

Is Rogozhin not capable of brightness? He says he loves her in a different way, that there is no compassion in him, “no such pity.” True, he added later that “your pity is maybe still worse than my love” – but he was slandering himself.

...No, Rogozhin was slandering himself; he has an immense heart, which is capable of passion and compassion. When he learns the whole truth and when he becomes convinced of what a pathetic creature this deranged, half-witted woman is – won’t he then forgive her all the past, all his suffering? Won’t he become her servant, her brother, friend, providence? Compassion will give meaning and understanding to Rogozhin himself. Compassion is the chief and perhaps the only law of being for all
mankind. (230)

In the margin, I copied the line, “Compassion will give meaning and understanding.” How quickly all of us move to judgment, sometimes because of passion, sometimes because of our simple weaknesses. Without passion, compassion can be nothing more than condescension, empty patronage, or so it can be argued. But passion alone is the thing that makes Rogozhin want to possess Nastasya Fillipovna and put a knife in her. It is this hatred of the prince’s compassion that makes Rogozhin try to put a knife in him. And it is the same passion without compassion that makes a man beat his wife, or makes one lover kill another. This is the desire to love without loving, it is the product of an undeveloped consciousness that fails to consider the making of meaning as essential to one’s humanity.

The passage closes with the idea of forgiveness, and given what happens in the conflagration at Lebedev’s house nearer the end of Part II, I’ll probably get at the idea of forgiveness, hopefully more briefly, in the next post.